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Killing MR Griffin - Lois Duncan
Killing MR Griffin - Lois Duncan
Killing MR Griffin - Lois Duncan
Table of Contents
Q&A with the Author
Copyright Page
“There are a lot of smart authors, and a lot of authors who write reasonably
well. Lois Duncan is smart, writes darn good books and is one of the most
entertaining authors in America.”
—Walter Dean Myers, Printz award–winning author of Monster and Dope Sick
“She knows what you did last summer. She knows how to find that secret
evil in her characters’ hearts, evil that she turns into throat-clutching
suspense in book after book. Does anyone write scarier books than Lois
Duncan? I don’t think so.”
—R. L. Stine, author of the Goosebumps and Fear Street series
“I couldn’t be more pleased that Lois Duncan’s books will now reach a new
generation of readers.”
—Judy Blume, author of Forever and Tiger Eyes
“Lois Duncan’s books kept me up many a late night reading under the
covers with a flashlight!”
—Wendy Mass, author of A Mango-Shaped Space, Leap Day and Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall
“Duncan is one of the smartest, funniest and most terrifying writers around
—a writer that a generation of girls LOVED to tatters, while learning to
never read her books without another friend to scream with handy.”
—Lizzie Skurnick, author of Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading
“In middle school and high school, I loved Lois Duncan’s novels. I still do.
I particularly remember Killing Mr. Griffin, which took my breath away. I
couldn’t quite believe a writer could do that. I feel extremely grateful to
Lois Duncan for taking unprecedented risks, challenging preconceptions
and changing the young adult field forever.”
—Erica S. Perl, author of Vintage Veronica
“Killing Mr. Griffin taught me a lot about writing. Thrilling stuff. It was
one of the most requested and enjoyed books I taught with my students. I
think it’s influenced most of my writing since.”
—Gail Giles, author of Right Behind You and Dark Song
“If ever a writer’s work should be brought before each new generation of
young readers, it is that of Lois Duncan.The grace with which she has led
her life—a life that included a tragedy that would have brought most of us
to our knees—is reflected in her writing, particularly in I Know What You
Did Last Summer.Her stories, like Lois herself, are ageless.”
—Chris Crutcher, author of Angry Management, Deadline and Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes
“Lois Duncan’s thrillers have a timeless quality about them. They are good
stories, very well told, that also happen to illuminate both the heroic and
dark parts of growing up.”
—Marc Talbert, author of Dead Birds Singing, A Sunburned Prayer and Heart of a Jaguar
“We are your students, present, past and future,” Mark told
him, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly.… “We are
representatives of every poor kid who has ever walked into
your dungeon of a classroom. We come to bring you ‘the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ We’re here to
deliver revenge.”
To my brother, Bill Steinmetz
CHAPTER 1
“Someday,” she had said at the breakfast table that very morning,
“someday I’m going to live in a cabin on the shore of a lake where
everything is peaceful and green and the only sound is lapping water.”
As soon as the words were out she had longed to snatch them back
again.
“How are you going to pay the property taxes?” her father had asked in
his usual reasonable way. “Lakeshore property doesn’t come cheap, you
know. Somebody’s going to have to finance that lovely green nest of
yours.”
“A rich husband!” her brother Craig had shouted, and the twins, who
were seven, had broken into jeers and laughter.
“Not too soon, I hope,” her mother had said, turning from the stove
with the frying pan in her hand. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure. That’s
what my grandmother always said. There’s plenty of time for everything.”
“For being an old maid?” the twin named Kevin had offered, giggling.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mrs. McConnell had told him. “Nobody is ever
an old maid these days. The term is ‘single person.’ Now, who wants
eggs?”
Someday, Susan had thought, sinking lower in her chair, someday I am
going to move out of this house and away from this family. I’ll live all alone
in a place where I can read and write and think, and the only time I’ll ever
come here is for Christmas.
“Are you going to be a single person, Sue?” the twin named Alex had
asked with false innocence, jabbing his brother with his elbow, and Craig
had grinned with maddening twelve-year-old self-assurance and said,
“You’ve got to go out on dates before you get married, and Sue hasn’t even
started that yet.”
“All things in good time,” Mrs. McConnell had told them mildly, and
Mr. McConnell had said, “Speaking of property taxes—” and they had been
off on another subject.
And Susan, with her eyes on her plate, had told herself silently,
someday—someday—
The dust stung the sides of her face, filling her nose and coating her lips.
With a whir and a flutter, half a dozen sheets of notebook paper went flying
past her like strange, white birds released suddenly from the confinement
of their cage.
“Grab them!” somebody shouted. “Get them before they go over the
fence!”
Susan turned to see David Ruggles running toward her, the slightness
and delicacy of his bone structure giving him the framework of a kite with
his blue Windbreaker billowing out beneath his arms, the wind seeming to
lift and carry him. He sailed by her, grabbing frantically for the escaping
papers, and Susan dropped her hands from their protective encasement of
her glasses and snatched wildly at the air.
The paper she was trying for lurched suddenly to the ground in front of
her, and her foot came down upon it, grinding it into the dirt. Susan stooped
and snatched it up.
“It’s torn!” The dirty imprint of her shoe was stamped irrevocably in its
center. “I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter.” David shrugged his shoulders and reached to take
the paper from her hand. “The rest of it’s blown away anyhow. One ripped
page isn’t going to make any difference. If it’s not all there, Griffin won’t
take any of it.”
“Is it a song for Ophelia?”
“Yeah. It’s supposed to be, but I’m sure Griffin would have called it
something else. I haven’t done anything right for him yet.”
“Neither have I. I don’t think anyone has.” Susan fell into step beside
him, her heart lifting suddenly, her depression disappearing. The wind
wasn’t so bad after all,for it had blown this luck upon her, the unbelievable,
undreamed-of event of herself, Susan McConnell, entering the halls of Del
Norte High School side by side with beautiful, popular David Ruggles,
president of the senior class.
For the last year of her life, Susan had dreamed about David every
night, at least every night in which she could remember having a dream. In
some of the dreams he smiled at her, the open, sweet, heart-clenching smile
that belonged to him alone. In others they sat and talked for hour after hour,
sharing with each other private thoughts and longings. Never yet had there
been a dream in which they walked shoulder to shoulder into English class
with everyone, even Betsy Cline, turning to stare, to envy, to wonder.
When they reached the door to the building, David struggled with it,
pulling with all the weight of his slight frame as the wind forced it closed.
For a moment it seemed it would be a draw, but in the end David won, and
he and Susan staggered into the crowded hallway where numerous other
red-faced, wind-torn students laughed, jostled, shoved tangled hair out of
their faces and shouted things like, “So much for my hair!” and “Look what
the wind just blew in!”
Susan took off her glasses and wiped the dust from the lenses with the
front of her blouse. By the time she put them back on, David had moved
away from her. She started to press forward to regain her place beside him,
but others had already fallen into it. Mark Kinney: lean, expressionless,
cool. Jeff Garrett: big, loud, broad-shouldered.
“Hey, Dave, where were you last night, man?” Jeff asked. “We looked
for you after the game.”
“I had to miss it. Sorry. Three hours’ worth of homework.”
“Two of them for Griffin’s class, I’ll bet.”
“A lot of good it did me. Whole stupid assignment blew out of my
hands on the way in here—”
They were too far ahead of her now for her to hear them, and Susan
accepted defeat. It didn’t really matter anyway. Walking into class beside
David Ruggles would have been a farce and everyone would have known
it. Another girl might have pulled it off, someone with more sophistication
than she, someone used to walking beside attractive boys and chatting gaily
and smiling disarmingly. The only attractive boys Susan ever walked
beside were named McConnell, and most of the time she hated all three of
them.
Oh, well, she thought wryly, at least I stepped on his paper. That’s
more than has ever happened before. Next time we meet he’ll know who I
am—the girl with the dirty shoes. Alex’s question came back to her—“Are
you going to be a single person, Sue?” No. Yes. Probably—wasn’t that an
appropriate fate for someone like Susan McConnell? Someone with a
handsome father and a gorgeous, vivacious mother, whose looks had all
been poured into three dreadful, handsome, smart-ass little boys?But that
was for now. Things did sometimes change. Someday—Someday, what?
Her boniness would blossom into curves? She would get contact lenses?
She who had been told by not one, not two, but three different doctors that
her corneas weren’t shaped right to allow her to wear them? Someday she
would turn into a heart-stopping beauty overnight? Is that what would
happen?
Why did she keep trying to fool herself by thinking “someday” when
the word was actually “never”?
Morosely, Susan let the tide of bodies sweep her on down the hall and
to the door of Room 117. She paused in the doorway long enough to glance
about the room. The boys were there ahead of her, David already in his
accustomed seat, three from the back in the fifth row, Jeff blocking the
center aisle as he stood by Mark’s desk, continuing their conversation.
In the seat in front of David, Betsy Cline turned and said something in a
low-pitched, conspiratorial manner. David smiled and nodded.
Sure that she would be unable to wedge herself past Jeff and too shy to
ask him to move, Susan entered the room along the side aisle in order to
approach her desk from the opposite direction. She smiled tentatively at
two girls in the front of the row, but they were talking to each other and did
not seem to notice her, so she let her eyes shift away from them and clung
tightly to the smile, as though it had not been for them at all but for some
private joke that had come suddenly into her mind. She smiled all the way
up the aisle, only letting her face relax when she had slipped into her seat.
She glanced up at the wall clock at the front of the room. Two minutes
to nine. Two minutes for friends to chatter to each other while Susan stared
at her desktop.
Why was it that some people—girls like Betsy, for instance—were
noticed and spoken to and appreciated without ever making the slightest
effort? It was not all looks, certainly. When you analyzed Betsy, she was
not really pretty—she had a round, snub-nosed, pussycat face and short,
muscular, cheerleader legs and a sprinkling of freckles. But ask anyone,
even the newest of the freshmen, “Who is that girl over there?” and the
answer you got would be, “That’s Betsy Cline. Doesn’t everyone know
her?”
The large hand on the wall clock snapped forward with an inaudible
click. One minute now until class time. Susan opened her purse and
rummaged through it, pretending to be looking for something important. It
was easier than simply sitting or than trying again with the smile routine. In
other classes it was not quite as difficult. For one thing, she was a straight-
A student and people had questions to ask her about homework. Here, in
English Literature and Composition, there was no such thing as an A
student. With all her effort she was earning B’s. Even so, it was more than
most of the other students were getting. The mid-semester exam had been a
disaster for everyone, and it was rumored that the final was being
constructed so that it would be impossible for even the brightest student
topass.
“Griffin must be lying awake at night,” Jeff Garrett had commented
yesterday in the cafeteria. “He’s trying to think of questions that don’t have
answers.” His voice had rung through the room, and everyone had started
laughing, knowing whom he was talking about, even if they had missed
hearing the name.
Susan dug into the open purse and drew out a felt pen, a stick of gum, a
dime and two pennies. She examined them with affected interest before
letting them fall back again.
The hand of the clock moved forward one final click. The bell rang.
And Mr. Griffin stepped through the doorway into the classroom, pulling
the door shut behind him.
The day had officially begun.
Never once could Susan recall a morning when Mr. Griffin had not
been there standing in front of them at the precise moment the bell stopped
ringing. Other teachers might saunter in late, delayed in the teachers’
lounge for a last drag on a cigarette or a final swallow of morning coffee.
Other teachers might pause in the hall to secure a button or tie a shoestring.
Other teachers might sometimes not appear at all while unorganized
substitutes stumbled over their lesson plans and finally gave up and let
everybody out early.
But Mr. Griffin was always there, as reliable as the bell itself, stiff and
straight in a navy blue suit, white shirt and tie, his dark hair slicked flat
against his head, his mouth firm and uncompromising beneath the small,
neatly trimmed mustache.
His eyes moved steadily up and down the rows, taking a silent roll call
as the buzz of conversation dwindled and faded to silence.
“Good morning, class,” he said.
Susan answered automatically, her voice joining the uneasy chorus.
“Good morning, Mr. Griffin.”
“Please take out your homework assignments and pass them to the
front. Miss Cline, will you collect them, please?”
Susan opened her folder and withdrew the sheets of paper on which she
had printed the verses she had composed the night before.
In the seat behind her, Jeff raised his hand.
“Mr. Garrett?”
“I don’t have mine finished yet, Mr. Griffin. There was a basketball
game last night, and I was one of the starters.”
“That must have created a great problem for you, Mr. Garrett.”
“I couldn’t very well skip the game, could I?” Jeff said. “The team was
counting on me. We were playing Eldorado.”
“Basketball is indeed an important reason for attending high school,”
Mr. Griffin said in an expressionless voice. “The ability to drop balls
through baskets will serve you well in life. It may keep your wrists limber
into old age.
“Mr. Ruggles, your hand is raised. Do you have a similar disclosure to
make?”
“I did the assignment, sir,” David said. “It blew out of my notebook. I’ll
redo it tonight.”
“I have never accepted late papers on windy days. Miss Cline?”
“I didn’t understand the assignment,” Betsy said. Her eyes were wide
and worried. “How can anybody write a final song for Ophelia when she’s
already said everything there is to say? All that about rosemary being for
remembrance and everything? Nothing happens to her after that except she
drowns.”
“There are those who might consider suicide an event of some
importance in a young woman’s life,” Mr. Griffin said drily. “Are there any
other comments?” The room was silent. “Then will those of you who were
able to find some final words for poor Ophelia please pass them forward?”
At least we don’t have to read them aloud, Susan thought in relief. That
was a possibility she had not thought about last night when she sat at the
desk in her room, letting the words pour from her. There, caught by the
magic of the painful story, she had let herself become Ophelia—lonely,
alienated from the world, sickened with the hopelessness of her love,
gazing into the depths of the water that would soon become her grave.
Only this morning, as she was leaving the house, had the horrible
thought occurred to her—What if he makes us read the songs in class?
There was no way that she could have done that. Too much of Susan lay
exposed in the neatly printed verses, intermixed with the persona of
Ophelia.
Now she scanned her words again—
He remembered the first time they had met each other. Jeff had been twelve
then, big for his age, standing head and shoulders above the others in the
seventh-grade classroom. He had felt huge and self-conscious. His voice
had already been starting to change. When roll was called he had answered
with a froglike croak, and the rest of the class had burst into laughter.
Even the teacher had smiled, and Jeff had felt the sting of hot tears in
his eyes. He had blinked them back, furious at himself, hating all of them.
Choking on his own fury, he had wedged himself into the seat behind his
desk, wishing he could disappear beneath it.
His eyes had shifted sideways, and he had found himself caught by the
gaze of the boy in the seat across from him. He was a strange-looking boy
with a face like a fox and cool, appraising, gray-marble eyes.
The boy had continued to stare at him without a flicker of anything that
looked like honest interest. He had just stared. Jeff had dropped his own
eyes. A few minutes later he had raised them again. The boy was still
staring.
When lunch period arrived, Jeff had stayed in his seat, pretending to
shuffle through papers until the classroom was empty. Then he had gotten
up and gone out the door into the hall.
The boy had been standing there, waiting for him.
“You get mad too easy,” he had said, falling into step beside him. “You
let everything hang out. That’s not good.”
“What’s it to you?” Jeff had asked angrily. “Who the hell are you,
anyway? I’ve never seen you around before.”
“My name’s Mark Kinney. I’m new in town. Moved here to live with
my aunt and uncle.” The boy had been a good six inches shorter than he,
but he walked tall. Jeff had the strange feeling that they were the same
height. “You’re Jeff Garrett.”
“How do you know that?”
“I listened at roll call. I remember names.” The boy’s shorter legs had
lengthened their stride to keep pace with Jeff ’s longer ones. “I’m gonna do
something after school. Something real interesting. Want to come?”
“What?” Jeff asked, interested despite himself. “What are you going to
do?”
“Do you like cats?”
“Not especially.”
“Neither do I. I’ve got a plan. Something I’m going to do with a cat.
You coming?”
“Will it take long?” Jeff had asked. “I’ve got a paper route.”
“Not long.”
“Okay, I’ll come then.” He had looked at the boy more closely now, at
the odd, wide-cheeked face, the tight, tan skin, the sparkling gray eyes.
There was something almost magnetic about those eyes. “What are you
going to do?”
“You’ll see.”
“Where are you going to do it?”
“Behind the school. Behind the cafeteria where they keep the garbage
cans. I’ll meet you there at three thirty.”
“Okay. Why not?” He did not know why he agreed. He had no real
interest in meeting anybody anywhere when school was over. But he had
said, “Okay.” And he had gone.
Now, five years later, he heard himself saying again, “Okay. Okay, why
not?”
“Good boy,” Mark said, and Betsy flashed him a smile of approval. Jeff
slid his hand along the back of the seat until it rested behind her head. This
time she did not pull away.
“It’ll be fun,” she said. “Like a game. We ought to have something fun
to remember from high school. When my dad was in school, do you know
what he did? He and a friend of his got a copy of a key to one of the doors
of the building, and one night they took a horse out of a farmer’s pasture
and put it in the girls’ restroom. He still talks about it—the way a bunch of
girls went in the next morning and came out screaming!”
“We’ll remember this the same way,” Mark said. “You’ll tell your kids
about it. Griffin, thrashing and crawling, begging us not to hurt him—
that’ll be something to remember.”
He wasn’t smiling. Mark seldom smiled. But his face was aglow with a
strange luminosity, an inner light that seemed to come through his skin and
give it an odd, ethereal radiance. His eyes, what could be seen of them
under the drooping lids, had the glint of smoked glass caught in a ray of
sunlight. No one would ever have called Mark Kinney handsome, but there
were moments when he had a special beauty, something so striking and
strange that it stopped the heart and caused those near him to catch their
breath.
It was a transformation Jeff had come to recognize. He hadseen it for
the first time back in junior high school, on that day they had met each
other—the time that Mark had set fire to the cat.
CHAPTER 3
There were times when he wondered if his mother did this sort of thing
deliberately, knowing that the old woman liked lime Jell-O and knowing
too that he would be the one stuck with telling her that it wasn’t there.
As soon as he allowed such a conjecture to cross his mind, he was
swept with guilt. His mother did well to make it to the grocery store at all
after a full day typing and answering phones in an office. In her place
another woman would have forgotten the Jell-O completely, or maybe even
not have come home at all. There were women who did that, just took off
and went when things got too rough for them. He had read an article on that
subject only recently. The author had given some surprisingly high number
of such cases and had said that runaway wives in America were soon going
to equal or exceed the number of runaway husbands.
But his mother would not be one of them, of that he could be sure. To
begin with, she wasn’t a wife and hadn’t been one for over ten years. On
top of that, she was super-responsible. Everybody told him that—his aunts,
the neighbors, even their minister.
“I hope you appreciate your mother,” the Reverend Chandler had said
one Sunday after services. “There aren’t many women who would do what
she has—taken an invalid mother-in-law into her home to love and care for
after being deserted by her own husband. Your mother’s a saint, son, and
don’t you forget it. You’re a lucky boy to have the opportunity of growing
up in her home.”
“I know it, sir,” David had assured him, conscious of his mother
standing behind him, knowing without looking that she had heard the
minister’s words and was pleased by them.
When they reached the car she had been smiling a little and the harsh
lines between her eyes and at the corners of her mouth had softened. At that
moment she had looked startlingly like the girl in the wedding picture that
David had found one day in a suitcase in the attic.
“Would you like to stop and pick up some ice cream on the way
home?” she had asked him.
The pleasant mood had stayed with her most of the rest of the day.
“Davy?”
“Coming, Gram. I’ve got your sandwich.” He carried it in to her on a
plate. “Do you want some milk?”
“No. It curdles in my stomach. That’s what happens when you get old.
Have you made the Jell-O?”
“I’m getting ready to now.”
Back in the kitchen he poured the boiling water into a bowl and mixed
in the orange gelatin and added ice. He set the bowl in the refrigerator and
ran more water into the sink over the breakfast dishes. He squirted in dish
soap.
David Ruggles, President of the Senior Class, King of the Sink! His lips
curled wryly. What would everyone at school think if they could see him
now, playing the maid in a house that didn’t even have a dishwasher?
David had never overestimated himself. He knew exactly who he was
and what he could do with what he had. He knew he was handsome. It was
an unusual sort of handsomeness, but it was there, and it worked.
He looked exactly like his father. He couldn’t remember his father very
well, but he knew what he looked like from the wedding picture. His father
had been a small man, slightly built, with the most beautiful face in the
world. When David looked at himself in the mirror he saw that face
looking back at him, fine-boned, delicate, perfectly shaped with gentle eyes
and a fine, sensitive mouth.
He wondered sometimes what his father had been like as a person, with
a face like that. He compared the face with his mother’s, strong and
sensible, and he tried to imagine the two of them together, laughing and
joking and holding hands, kissing perhaps. It was impossible. In his mind
his father’s face was floating on a cloud, his mother’s coming in the door
behind a bag of groceries. One was a dream, the other reality.
He finished sponging the dishes and ran hot water from the tap straight
over them to wash off the suds. His mother didn’t like him to do this, as it
used up too much hot water, but it was fast and easy.
From the back room his grandmother called, “Davy? Is the Jello-O
ready yet?”
“No, Gram. It’ll be a couple of hours. I just put it in the fridge.”
He left the kitchen and went in to pick up the sandwich plate.
“Do you need anything else?”
“Yes,” the old woman said. “I have to go to the little girls’ room.”
“Oh, Gram, can’t you wait awhile?”
“I’ve been waiting all day.”
He knew this was not true. There was no way his grandmother waited
all day for something like that. When she was alone in the house, she got
up and did whatever it was she had to do. He knew for a fact that she went
to the refrigerator and took out the lunch his mother left prepared for her,
and there were times when he found things around the house—candy,
movie magazines—that must have been purchased down at the corner
store.
But now, helpless in the flowered bathrobe, she appealed to him.
“I have to go.”
“All right, Gram. Okay. Hold on to me.”
He helped her out of the chair and, slipping one arm around her
scrawny body and a hand beneath her elbow, he half led, half carried her to
the little bathroom that sat between the bedroom and the kitchen.
“You okay now?”
“All right, Davy. I’ll tell you when I want to go back.”
“You do that.” His voice was sharp. He caught it and forced a gentler
tone. “You call me, Gram.” That was better. “I’ll be right here.”
He went into the living room, a dark, small room with a musty smell.
He had often wondered why it was called a “living room,” since it seemed
to have less life than any other room in the house. The blinds were usually
drawn to protect the rug from the morning sun, and they were seldom
raised in the afternoon because no one thought to raise them. The couch
was covered with a plastic casing. The books and CD player were in his
room, the television in the room shared by his mother and grandmother.
The only thing alive in the whole living room was the telephone, and it
sat silent on its hook so much of the time that it might as well not have
existed at all. He sat down next to it and considered dialing a number. Any
number, just to hear a voice. But he didn’t know anyone’s cell numbers and
no one else was sitting around with nothing to do, like him. Mark would be
out somewhere with Jeff and Betsy, or some of the rest of the group that
always trailed around after him. What they did when they “went out
somewhere” was never exactly explicable. Most of the time they just rode
around in Jeff ’s car, stopping at one place after another, wandering
aimlessly about town, honking the horn at friends and laughing and kidding
around.
He knew he was welcome to join them. Mark had asked him more than
once, and Jeff had also.
David had said, “Thanks, but I’ve got stuff to do at home,” and let it go
at that. He knew they would never understand his mother’s reasoning that
there should be a definite, preplanned activity or time was being wasted.
“Where is it you’re going?” she would ask. “What is it you’re going to
do there? Where can I reach you in an emergency?”
It wasn’t that she forbade him to go places, it was just that by the time
they finished hashing things over his enthusiasm had usually faded to the
point where going was hardly worth the effort.
“Unless there’s a reason,” his mother said, “a real reason, it’s nice for
you to be at home in the afternoons. Your grandmother sits there alone all
day, you know, and your homecoming at three is the high point of her day.”
In the evenings they ate later than most people because his mother
wasn’t up to facing the kitchen immediately after a day at work.
Then there was homework.
“It’s important to keep up with your studies,” his mother told him.
“You’re our hope for the future, Davy. Anything good that happens to this
family will come through you.”
This was true, he knew, and he thought about it often. His mother’s
salary as a secretary was not going to increase, and there was no place she
could move within the ranks of the company for which she worked without
more training. She couldn’t afford school, and with outstanding bills and
bad credit, no one would give her a loan. Her life was at a stalemate, and
remarriage for her seemed highly unlikely. It wasn’t that she was
unattractive; at forty-two she still looked remarkably good, with a lean,
strong figure and hair as dark and thick as David’s own. But she had no
interest in meeting men or in going out with them.
“One marriage is enough for anybody,” she stated firmly. And then,
after a slight pause, she would sometimes add, “More than enough,” with a
note of bitterness in her voice.
So when David was grown, his mother would be there still, slaving
away to make ends meet. And, for all he knew, Gram would be there too.
For an invalid, Gram seemed amazingly healthy, scarcely ever coming
down with the illnesses other people were prone to. Perhaps it was because,
cloistered as she was, she never got exposed to any germs. Anyway, despite
her age, she didn’t show any indication of leaving her present world for the
next one at any time in the near future.
When he hit the job market, David figured, he could count on two
people to support other than himself. For that reason it was important to
have the best educational background possible. His father had gone to
Stanford. That, for David, was out of the question, but with a top-notch
transcript and high ACT scores, he figured he would definitely be in the
running for the special scholarship offered annually by the president of the
University of New Mexico to an outstanding and needy student from the
Albuquerque area. In the long run, he had his hopes pinned on law school.
To this end he ran for school offices and took part in debating and other
speech-oriented activities. Such things looked good on your record if you
were aiming for a prelaw program.
Now, in his last semester of high school, that record looked good, but
since the president’s scholarship was not awarded until final grades were
out, what concerned him was the upcoming grade in English. He had
always considered himself a good English student; he read his assignments
faithfully and was meticulous about his essays. Dolly Luna, last year’s
teacher (formally she was “Miss Luna,” but the first day of class she had
told them, “Call me Dolly”), had given him A’s on all his papers, followed
by strings of exclamation marks.
But the same sort of essays submitted in Mr. Griffin’s class brought C’s.
“Mechanics okay,” Griffin had written on one paper. “You have a grasp
of grammar and punctuation, but the writing itself is shallow. There’s
nothing to it. Don’t parrot back my lectures. Get under the surface. Tell me
something about Hamlet I don’t already know.”
“Something he doesn’t know!” David had exclaimed in frustration
when that paper was returned to him. “He’s supposed to be the expert. I’m
just a student. If there’s stuff about Shakespeare he doesn’t know, what’s he
doing teaching it?”
And now, today, those blown-away papers added an F to his grade list,
which very likely brought the average down to D. He had done what he
could about it, even skipping lunch in order to rewrite the paper, but true to
his word, Griffin would not accept it.
“I thought I made it clear, Mr. Ruggles,” he had said in his cool, crisp
voice, “that I do not take late papers, no matter what the excuse for them
may be.”
So that whole hour’s work had been for nothing, and unless he could
ace the final, which seemed unlikely, he would probably find that D
permanently situated on his transcript.
“I can see why Mark did what he did last semester,” he muttered
angrily. “I might be tempted to try the same thing myself, if I thought it
would do any good.”
A chime rang out.
Startled, David reached for the telephone receiver, stopped, waited.
Then he realized it had been the doorbell.
Who on earth? he thought, getting up and crossing the room.
He opened the front door.
“Oh, hey, I was just thinking about you.”
“You were, huh?” Mark’s lean figure stood slouched in the doorway.
“You got a girl in there or something? Why’s it so dark?”
“You know my mom,” David said. “She doesn’t want the rug to bleach
out. You got the gang with you?”
“Jeff and Betsy are out front in Jeff ’s car. Want to go cruising? We’ve
got an idea about something we want to talk over with you.”
“I can’t right now. I’ve got stuff I’m supposed to be doing here.” David
was acutely conscious of the old woman in the bathroom only a couple of
yards away. Any moment now her voice might ring out asking to be taken
back to her room. Mark knew more about his family life than anyone at
school, but details like this were more than he needed to be subjected to.
“I’ll walk out to the car with you,” David said. “Can’t you cue me in on
the basics?”
“It’ll take more time than that,” Mark said. “There’s a lot to be worked
out. What it boils down to is this—we’re out to work over Griffin.”
“Work him over?”
“Scare him shitless. Get him crawling. Teach him he can’t pull the sort
of stuff he pulled today.”
“How are you going to do it?”
“We’re going to kidnap him,” Mark said. “We’re going to make him
think we’re going to kill him.”
“Oh, wow,” David said, drawing in his breath. “That’s heavy stuff,
man. You could get into all kinds of trouble.”
“I don’t think so. Not if he’s blindfolded. Not the way I’m working it
out.” Mark put a hand on his shoulder. “How about it, Dave? Want to be a
part of it?”
From the dark behind them a cracked old voice called, “Davy?”
“Look,” David said, “like I told you, I’ve got some stuff to do. Later,
after dinner, I’m going to the library. I’ll meet you then, say around eight,
okay? At the Burger Shack?”
“Not okay. I need to know now.” Mark’s hand remained warm on his
shoulder. His voice dropped until it was almost a whisper, so intense that
the words came forth in short, painful jabs. “Dave—how can you stand it—
living like this? How long has it been—since you did something crazy—
just for the hell of it? How long has it been—since you’ve done something
wild—just for fun?”
“You’re not really planning to hurt him?”
“Hell, no. Just scare him. Shake him up some. Are you with us?”
All of David’s life rose up behind him in one great, gray wave.
“Count me in,” he said.
CHAPTER 4
The alarm went off at seven, and Cathy Griffin reached out
without opening her eyes and pressed the button to shut it off. Just as
automatically, she reached for Brian in the bed beside her, to find nothing
but an empty pillow and a mass of tangled sheets.
She groped for a moment, as though expecting to find him there,
twisted somehow into the sheets or buried beneath the untidy lumps of
blanket. Then, as she became more fully conscious, she sighed and opened
her eyes to affirm the fact that she was, indeed, alone in the double bed.
That man, she thought. I don’t know why he owns an alarm clock. He
never bothers to use it.
The sound of running water told her the shower in the bathroom was in
use. She lay quiet, letting herself come slowly awake, until the water
stopped and she heard the shower stall open and slam closed.
A few moments later the bathroom door opened, and Brian came into
the bedroom, dressed in T-shirt and boxers, toweling his hair.
“Morning, Bri,” Cathy greeted him, hauling herself to a sitting position.
“What’s the order of the day, fried or scrambled?”
“Go back to sleep,” Brian told her. “I’ll fix my own eggs this morning.”
“No, I want to.” A moment before she would have given anything to
have been able to roll over and sink back into slumber. Now that she had
been given a reason to, some contrariness in her personality kept her from
doing it. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up slowly,
adjusting herself to the unaccustomed weight of her rounded belly.
“There’s nothing in the rules that says that pregnant women can’t cook
breakfast.”
“You’re sure you feel like it?”
“Of course.” And now, suddenly, she did. She gave him a quick kiss on
the cheek in passing, pulled a terry-cloth robe on over her nightgown, and
padded barefoot out to the kitchen to put on the coffee.
To Cathy, going barefoot meant springtime. Raised on a farm in
Michigan, she had gone barefoot in childhood from the time the first
dandelions appeared in the new grass to the time of the first snowfall. Her
feet were so tough that she thought sometimes she could walk across a bed
of nails without any discomfort.
To Brian, whose own feet were soft and tender as a baby’s, the whole
idea was upsetting.
“You’ll step on something,” he told her. “That’s the way people get
tetanus.” It was one of their minor differences. There were many others. In
fact, if a programmer had planned the most unsuitable partnership
imaginable, Brian and Cathy Griffin could have been the outcome. Brian
had his master’s degree in English from Stanford University; Cathy had
been a C student in high school and had never gone to college. He had until
recently been assistant professor in English at the University of
Albuquerque; she had until two months ago sold contemporary sportswear
at a department store.
Their personalities were as different as their backgrounds.
“He’s a fine man, I’m sure,” Cathy’s mother had said the first time she
met him. “He’s certainly brilliant and dedicated to his work. But he’s so
stiff and serious and—well, truthfully, dear, any man who is still a bachelor
at thirty-six has to have something the matter with him.”
“Perhaps he never met the right woman,” Cathy suggested mildly. “Or
maybe it just takes him so long to loosen up and break through the ice that
all the women he’s known have given up and walked off before they ever
really got to know him.”
“And you’ve decided to be different? Why?”
“Because I’m stubborn,” Cathy had admitted truthfully. “And because I
think that Brian Griffin is worth waiting for.”
And wait, she did. They had known each other two years before Brian
asked her to marry him and another year before that marriage took place.
At the time he proposed, he had told her of his decision to leave the
university and take enough education courses to become certified at the
high school level.
“It will be a year before I’ll be able to take on the responsibility of
marriage,” he had told her, “and even then it won’t be milk and honey. I’ll
be making less money than I have been, and there will be a lot less security.
I have tenure at the college, which I won’t have in high school. I might not
even be able to get a job immediately. The country’s overstocked with high
school teachers.”
“Then why do you want to be one?” Cathy had asked him, puzzled.
“Because there aren’t enough good ones,” Brian had told her. “Many of
the kids coming into my classes at the university are all but illiterate. You
give them a page to read, and they can’t tell you what’s on it. Try teaching
them the classics, and they can’t pronounce the words. Ask them to write
about something, and they can’t make complete sentences, much less spell
anything over two syllables.”
“Can’t you do anything about it?”
“I try, but it’s too late,” Brian had said. “By the time they’re in college,
it’s gone too far. They’ve had twelve years without disciplined learning,
and they don’t know how to apply themselves. They haven’t learned to
study or to pace their work so that projects get completed on time. They fall
asleep in lectures because they expect to be entertained, not educated.
“We lost a third of our freshman class last year. They dropped out at the
end of the first semester.”
“And what would you do as a high school teacher that isn’t being done
now?”
“I’d teach, damn it! I wouldn’t baby them or play games with them. I’d
push each one into doing the best work of which he or she was capable. By
the time they finished a class with me, my college prep students would be
able to handle university work.”
“And the others?” Cathy had known in her heart that, during her own
school years, “the others” would have included her.
“The others would graduate with a knowledge of what disciplined work
is all about. That should stand them in good stead, no matter what they
decide to do.”
“You wouldn’t be very popular, I’m afraid.”
“I’ve never been very popular. Anywhere. I have an abrasive
personality. Fierce dogs cower when I walk down the street and slink away
to hide under porches. Small children run screaming to their mothers.
Beautiful girls rip their numbers out of the phone book and chew them up
and swallow them, for fear I might call them.”
“Oh, Brian!” She had burst out laughing. He was so seldom humorous
that his awkward attempts at joking touched her deeply.
“And so,” he had continued, “are you willing to wait a year to be the
wife of a high school English teacher? It isn’t a very exciting prospect, I
must admit. Not nearly as respectable as being the wife of a college
professor. I wouldn’t blame you—I really wouldn’t—”
His sentence had trailed off, unfinished. His eyes had dropped from
hers, and she had looked down to see that his hands were clenched in his
lap, the knuckles white, the nails making little grooves in his palms. And
she had known then how much her answer meant to him.
“Yes,” she had said. “I’ll wait a year, Bri.”
“You’re sure it’s what you want?”
“I’m sure.”
And now, three years later, she was still sure. Cathy had never needed a
great deal to make her happy, and what she had now was more than
sufficient.
Humming tunelessly beneath her breath, she made the coffee, mixed
the frozen orange juice in a pitcher, put bread in the toaster, broke two eggs
into a pan.
It was springtime! Under the kitchen window the first hyacinths were
blooming. Last week’s dust storm was behind them, and the air was fresh
and clear and sweet. The nausea that had accompanied her first months of
pregnancy was over also. She would eat a good breakfast. Later in the
morning she would go out into the yard and sit in a lawn chair in the
sunshine.
She glanced up and smiled as Brian came in, his hair slicked down, his
hands deftly adjusting the knot in his tie.
“Do all the teachers at Del Norte wear ties to class?”
“No, the riffraff wear open-neck sports shirts.”
“Wouldn’t that be more comfortable?”
“I like a tie. It gives me dignity.” He was only half joking. “I got used
to wearing one at the university. Why change now?” He took his seat at the
kitchen table and reached for his glass of orange juice. “Call the pharmacy
and order a refill on my pills today, will you? I’ll pick them up on my way
home. That’ll be a bit later than usual.”
“Oh? A faculty meeting?”
“No, a student wants a conference. I’m meeting her at three. It may take
a while. She wants to go over some papers.”
“Is she one of your problems?” Cathy asked, sliding the eggs onto a
plate and carrying them over to him.
“No, actually she’s one of my good ones. Name’s Susan McConnell.
She’s quite a talented writer. Very imaginative. I had them all write final
songs for Ophelia. Hers was exceptionally good.”
“Have you told her that?”
“Of course not. I don’t want her resting on her laurels, thinking she’s a
genius. She still has things to learn. She tends to get overdramatic. And
she’s sloppy about details, spelling and punctuation and such. She’s not a
perfectionist.”
“She’s still young, Bri.” Cathy seated herself across from him. She took
a slice of toast and began to spread it with jam. “Most kids are sloppy.”
“I’m afraid you’re right about that.”
“Your own may be. Have you ever thought about that?”
“Brian Junior? Surely, you jest!” His eyes moved fondly to the bulge in
the front of her robe. “How is he this morning?”
“Fine and active.” She took a bite of toast. “Seriously, Bri, I worry
sometimes about that. About your wanting him perfect, and his not
measuring up. He might be born with crossed eyes or a birthmark or a
harelip or something. Would you still love him?”
“Of course.” He was answering her seriously. “He wouldn’t be able to
help those things. We’d ride with it, take care of him, get him fixed up if
we could. He’d still be ours.”
“If you really feel that way,” Cathy said thoughtfully, “why can’t you
be more tolerant of your students when they’re not perfect?”
“Because they can help it, especially with today’s technology. Anybody
can Google a word if he doesn’t know its meaning or use spell-check if he
doesn’t know how to spell it. Time can be planned so that assignments
come in on time. There’s no excuse for carelessness.
“The Ruggles boy, for example, came in last week with a real sob story
about how he completed his paper and the wind tore it out of his hands and
blew it away. Papers put carefully into a notebook don’t blow off. On a
windy day, you close a notebook and put it under your arm. That’s
elementary enough.”
“Did he redo the assignment?”
“He did, but I wouldn’t accept it. It would set a precedent. If I took one
late paper, I’d never be able to refuse the next one. Within a week
everything I’ve taught them about work discipline would be down the
drain. The class would be as much of a mess as the one taught by that idiot
Luna woman.”
“Dolly Luna.” She smiled despite herself. “I’ve got to meet her. After
all, the kids dedicated last year’s yearbook to her. Is she really a ‘dolly’?”
“Sure is. Two big eyes that open and shut, painted-on smile, head full
of sawdust. Ever see a thirty-year-old teenager? That’s our Dolly. She
doesn’t want the kids to think she knows more than they do for fear they
won’t like her.”
Cathy didn’t know why, but the metaphor struck her strangely. The grin
faded from her lips. She herself smiled a lot. She had never thought about
that.
“Brian,” she said slowly, “am I—do you think of me—as a ‘dolly’?”
“Of course not.” He was honestly shocked.
“What am I—when you think of me?”
“You? Why, you’re my wife.”
“Before that, what was I?”
“You were Cathy. You were real—a person. All you’ve ever been to me
is Cathy.”
He took a final swallow of coffee, stood up, took the paper napkin and
ran it across his teeth. It was a gesture she hated. If people were that
concerned about their teeth, they should brush them one extra time in the
morning.
At the same time it made him suddenly so human, so vulnerable, that
she wanted to hug him. It was terrible to be so in love with a man whose
weaknesses were his virtues.
“Bri,” she said, “I want to ask you a favor. About the McConnell girl.”
“What?” He looked surprised.
“If she is really as talented as you say, I want you to tell her. There’s
something, you know, to handing out something positive. So she
overwrites; so she’s messy. She’s imaginative and bright and special. You
said so yourself. I want you to tell her that.”
“Cathy, you don’t even know the kid.”
“Yes, I do.” She stood her ground. “Not personally, maybe, but I know
her. What you just said to me—‘you are real—you’re a person—you’re
Cathy’—that matters, Brian. Tell her that. ‘You are real—you are Susan—
you are a writer.’ You don’t have any idea how much it matters, to be real.”
“I can’t say a thing like that.”
“Then write it. Put it on her paper.”
“Not the test paper. She didn’t do well on that quiz. In fact, it’s her
worst paper so far. I think she’s got a boyfriend.”
“Then on another paper. On the song for Ophelia.”
“You are a bossy wench!” He made a grab for her. “Kiss me, Kate!”
“Not if you talk in Shakespeare.” She pulled back, both pleased and
offended. “You’re not taking me seriously. I meant it, every word about
Susan McConnell. You’re taking it too far, Bri. You’ve got to give them
something besides criticism.”
“I won’t tell you how to cook eggs; you don’t tell me how to teach a
class. Okay?” He was leaving now, and he was suddenly angry.
Her eyes filled with tears. It was ridiculous how often this happened
lately. It must have something to do with being pregnant, shethought. Every
time she got mad—or sad—or even happy—she cried.
“Okay,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “Have a good day. I’ll
phone the pharmacy for you as soon as it opens. I love you. I’ll see you
tonight.”
“Okay—later.”
He was out the door, and for one sharp moment she almost ran
screaming after him, “Come back!” That suddenly, that quickly, it struck
her—I don’t want him to go! He can’t go! Without reason, terror shot
through her. But she was as frozenas stone, her lips open to shrill the words
that would makehim stay.
Something is wrong, she thought wildly. Something terrible! Don’t go!
And as though her thoughts had been strong enough to reach out and
touch him, he was back again. He was bending over her, his hand under her
chin, raising her face to his.
“Cathy,” he said, “I love you.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I know.”
It was strange, like a formal good-bye. But how could it be, when he
would be back so soon, in only a matter of hours? After school, after the
conference with the McConnell girl, he would be home.
It will be different, she thought, when the baby comes. It will all be
different. Once he’s a father, he will be able to give love more easily. He’ll
be able to reach out to all of them then, and touch them.
It will be different—in only months now—when the baby comes.
CHAPTER 6
The women were seated around the card table, and it was Liz Cline’s turn
to deal when her hostess went to answer the telephone.
She came back to say, “That’s Betsy for you, Liz. She wants you to call
back after this hand.”
“Is she at home?” Mrs. Cline asked.
“Yes, and from the sound of things there are boys with her.”
“That’s normal for Bets. She can’t date one boy without taking on all
his buddies.”
She played out the hand, and excused herself. She found her cell in her
coat and called her home phone.
“Hello, dear. It’s Mom. Is something the matter?” The voices in the
background were loud and unmistakable. “What is Jeff yelling about?”
“Nothing, Mom. He and Mark are just horsing around. We’re going to
watch a movie.”
“All right. Fine. What is it you called about?”
“I just wondered if we could have some of the cake,” Betsy said. “I
didn’t want to cut into it if you were saving it for something.”
“Of course I’m not saving it. Cake is for eating. But keep it controlled,
will you? I know how those boys eat. Leave something for dinner.”
“Okay,” Betsy said, and, muffling the receiver, “Jeff, cool it, will you?
My mother’s on the phone, and I can hardly hear her.”
“And keep the racket down,” Liz Cline said, “or the neighbors will
have fits.”
“Will do. See you later. When do you think you’ll be home?”
“Oh, sixish or so I imagine. Good-bye, dear.”
She replaced the receiver on the hook and returned to the card table.
“I don’t know why my daughter has to do everything to extremes. Not
only does she date the tallest basketball player on the team, she picks the
one with the loudest voice. And that odd friend of his, Mark, never opens
his mouth when he’s around us, but he must be as bad as Jeff when they’re
alone. I could hear both of them as though they were right here in the room
with me.”
“Well, at least you know where she is and who she’s got with her.” Her
hostess shook her head despairingly. “Now, with my Cindy—”
At the Cline house, Betsy hung up the phone and clicked off the tape
recorder. The background noise stopped. She took the tape out of the
machine and went into the bedroom and put it in the top drawer of her
bureau under a pile of underwear. Then she went into the kitchen and cut
three thick slices of chocolate cake and put them on plates. She took out
three forks. Using each fork in turn, she systematically took a bite from
each of the cake slices. Then she smeared the frosting onto the plates.
She scraped most of the cake off the dishes and put it down the garbage
disposal. Scattering crumbs, she placed the plates and forks in the sink. She
went into the den and switched on the stereo, and the DVD she had selected
started playing. She turned up the volume.
Then, like David, she left the house and started back to the school
grounds. She had farther to go than David, but she did not have to run. She
had Jeff ’s car.
***
“I’m here,” David said. His face was red and his breath was coming in
gasps.
“Yeah, I see,” Mark said coldly. “You sure took your own sweet time
about it.”
“I ran all the way,” David said. “The pills took longer to work than I
thought they would. You can’t regulate something like that.”
“You could have doubled the dosage.”
“I didn’t know how strong they were. Too much could have killed her.”
“That’s crazy,” Jeff said. “Betsy’s mom swills them down like there’s
no tomorrow and she’s still alive and kicking.”
“My gram’s different. She’s an old lady.”
“Shut up, you guys.” Mark’s eyes were focused on the door of the
building. “Get in the backseat, quick, Dave. I think they’re coming.”
“They? You mean Sue’s with him? She was supposed to split and go in
the other direction.”
David opened the back door of the car and scrambled hastily inside.
Pulling the door closed, he disappeared behind the back of the front seat.
“I think—yeah, it’s both of them. She’s with him all right. She’s
walking him right out here like a good little puppy dog.” Mark gave Jeff a
nudge. “Get the mask on.”
“No way, man,” Jeff said. “I’m not going to show myself. He’ll know
me by my size.”
“You don’t have to ‘show yourself.’ Dave’s going to get him from
behind. But if he does happen to get an accidental glimpse of you, you’d
better have something over your face.” Mark was pulling the nylon
stocking over his own head. “Okay, you know what to do. He’ll go around
to the driver’s side and get in. When he starts to put the key into the
ignition, Dave will stand up and shove the bag down over his head. As
soon as he does that, you throw open the door on this side and jump in. Try
to get his arms pinned to his sides. I’ll run around the front of the car and
get him from the driver’s side.”
“What about Sue?”
“What about her? She’d better get the hell out of the way, that’s what.
Are you ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Jeff muttered.
The stocking over his face made him feel ridiculous. The eyeholes
didn’t line up properly, and the nylon half blocked the sight of his left eye.
He wondered where Betsy was. She was supposed to be here by this time
with his car. What if something had gone wrong and her mother hadn’t
gone to her card game after all or Betsy hadn’t been able to contact her
there? Or, worse still, what if Betsy had had a wreck on the way over? She
wasn’t a very good driver, and Jeff ’s car wasn’t the easiest in the world to
handle.
We shouldn’t have let her take it, he thought now, worriedly. Butif she
hadn’t, she would not have been able to get home in time to set things up
and return to the school yard.
He could hear their voices now, Susan’s high and strained, Mr. Griffin’s
crisp and businesslike the way it was when he gave class lectures. It was
evidently the end of a discussion that had been started back in the school
building.
“—didn’t think it would have to be perfect—” Susan was saying, and
Mr. Griffin—“That’s the whole point, Miss McConnell. Anything worth
doing is worth striving to perfect. If you are able to do it well, why should
you do it halfway?”
They were beside the car now, on the side facing the building. On the
other side Jeff and Mark crouched, heads low, hands braced on knees, in
the position of runners waiting for the shot.
“Thank you,” Susan said, “for staying to talk with me.”
“It’s pleasant to have a student show enough interest to request a
conference,” Mr. Griffin said. He opened the car door and then,
unbelievably, asked, “Have you far to go? I have to make a brief stop at a
drugstore, but I’ll be going straight home from there. I can drop you off at
your house on the way.”
“Oh, no—no, sir—thank you anyway.” Susan’s voice was shrill and
splintery, anything but normal.
That idiot, Jeff thought angrily. In another minute she’s going to be
bawling. He’s got to suspect something. He’ll look in the backseat for sure
and see Dave there. But, no—he was climbing into the car. He was closing
the door. Now he was rolling down the window and making some final
remark to Susan.
Crouched silent, tense with expectation, Jeff could hear the jangle of
the keys. Then there was a thump and Griffin’s voice rose sharply in a
muffled shout.
“He’s got him!” Mark exulted, and then they were both moving.
Jeff had the car door open in an instant and had hurled himself upon the
thrashing figure. From his position in the backseat, David was holding the
bag down with difficulty as the man in front twisted and shoved at it with
frantic hands. Jeff grabbed for his wrists and struggled to bring the arms
down to the sides, finding it far less easy than he had anticipated.
A line of poetry sprang into his head, unexpectedly. “Who would have
thought the old man had so much strength in him!” No—that wasn’t it—it
was “blood”—“had so much blood in him.” Where had he heard that? In
class, of course. It was something from Shakespeare. The realization filled
him with a surge of unreasonable fury. Griffin had them brainwashed!
Shakespeare was coming out of their ears!
Mark had the other door open now and was trying to loop the rope.
“Pin his arms, damn it!” he growled.
“I’m trying!” Jeff got a grip on Griffin’s wrists and heaved himself up
so that his entire weight was bearing down on the struggling figure.
“There—that does it! Get the rope around him!”
“Damned bastard’s a wildcat!”
“Man, you can say that again!”
Between them they hauled him forward on the seat and began winding
the ropes around him as though he were a mummy. Mr. Griffin’s efforts
were weaker now; they came in spasm-like jerks. He raised his knees
suddenly, jabbing Mark in the ribs. Mark brought the flat edge of his hand
down hard on one kneecap, and the legs went limp.
“Okay now. I think we’ve got him where we want him. Let me get this
knotted.”
“What about the bag?” David panted. “He can’t get much air in there.
We don’t want him to suffocate.”
“We’ve got to leave it on for now,” Mark whispered. “It keeps him
quiet, and we don’t want him yelling. When we get outside the city limits
we’ll substitute a blindfold.”
“Do you think he can hear with that over his head?”
“Not much, but it’s still better to disguise our voices. Don’t use names
or say anything you don’t want him remembering later.” Mark’s face was
glowing. “Hey, man, didn’t I tell you we could do it? It went just perfect!”
“So far, at least.” Jeff leaned against the back of the seat, breathing
hard. He still found himself astonished at the teacher’s strength. “He’s a
live one, you’ve got to say that for him. What’ll we do now?”
“Just what we planned to do. Take him up to the waterfall.”
“But my car isn’t here yet.”
“We’ll take his. The girls can follow when the other car shows up. They
know where to go.”
From his place in the backseat of the car, David rolled down the
window and leaned out. Susan was standing several feet away. Her face
was white, and tears were streaming down it.
“What’s the matter?” David asked her.
“It was awful—just awful. You said you weren’t going to hurt him.”
“We didn’t. He’s just fine. If I pull off this bag, the first thing he’d do
would be spit in my face.”
“You said yourself that he can’t breathe!”
“If he passes out, we’ll open it up. I’ll keep watch on that, don’t worry.
That’s my job. I’m ‘bag boy.’”
“We’re going to go on now,” Mark said. “It’s too risky to stay parked
here. Besides, we don’t have too much time if we want our alibis to work
for us. You”—he gestured to Susan—“stay here and wait for—her. It’s best
we don’t use people’s names when we talk about them. As soon as she gets
here, follow us up. Got it?”
Wordlessly, Susan nodded. The tears kept coming.
“Oh, Christ.” Mark shot her a glance of disgust. “Cut the waterworks.
Nothing’s happened that wasn’t supposed to happen. Do you know what
you’re supposed to do?”
“Yes,” Susan whispered.
“Okay. We’ll see you there.”
Mark turned the key in the ignition and started the engine. It died on
him, and he cursed and tried it again. This time it caught, and he pressed
down on the accelerator. The car moved slowly across the parking lot and
pulled out onto the street.
Standing alone in the empty lot, Susan watched it until it reached the
corner. Then it turned east in the direction of the mountains, and she could
see it no longer. It was less than five minutes before Jeff ’s Ford pulled into
the lot with Betsy behind the wheel. When she saw Susan her eyes widened
with alarm.
“What happened? Where is everybody?”
“They went on,” Susan told her. “They said to tell you to meet them up
where we had the picnic.”
“Did it work? Did everything go all right? Do they have him tied up
and everything?”
“It went—just like it was supposed to,” Susan told her.
“And I had to miss all the excitement!” Betsy brought her fist down
hard on the edge of the steering wheel. “Everything went fine at my end,
and then on the way over here I got stopped by a cop. He said I was
speeding, which I wasn’t. And, of course, I had to explain it was my
boyfriend’s car, which was why the registration was in his name, not mine.
It took forever.” She glanced at her watch. “Well, hurry up and get in.”
Susan said, “You go without me.”
“Why?” Betsy asked. She looked more closely at Susan’s face. “Have
you been crying? Did something go wrong that you haven’t told me
about?”
“No, nothing went wrong.” Susan bit at her lower lip to stop the
trembling. “I just don’t want to go, that’s all. I’ve done my part—what I
said I’d do. Now I don’t want to do anything more.”
“But this is the part we’ve been waiting for! This is when we’re really
going to bring him down!” Betsy’s blue eyes were shining. She had the
same bright, sparkling look that she had on the edge of the football field
when she was leading a cheer for the winning team. “Sue, you don’t want
to miss out on this!”
“I said, I’m not going.”
“Well, that’s your choice, I guess.” Betsy gunned the engine. “Honestly,
I don’t understand you.”
“I don’t either, really.”
As Mark had said, it had all gone perfectly, just as they had visualized
it. But one thing had happened for which she had not been prepared. The
word Mr. Griffin had shouted as the bag came down upon him had been,
“Run!”
His concern in that instant had not been for himself, but for her.
CHAPTER 7
Betsy was not accustomed to being thwarted. For most of her life she had
gotten what she wanted when she wanted it. An only child, she had been
born conveniently to parents who wanted a daughter. The fact that she had
also been born blond and cuddly and had smiled early and often had made
her reception even warmer.
By the time she was a year old, Betsy had accepted the fact that little
girls who handed out smiles and kisses could name their own rewards, and
the self-confidence this knowledge gave her served her well. In
kindergarten she was selected to serve the juice and hand out pencils; in
grammar school she collected more valentines and received more phone
calls than anyone in her class. To be “Betsy Cline’s friend” was an honor
eagerly sought by her classmates, and to be “someone on Betsy’s shit list”
was social suicide. When Shauna Bearman, a black-haired, porcelain-
complexioned beauty, was selected to play Snow White in the fifth-grade
play, she found herself the only one in the class excluded from Betsy’s
tenth birthday party, and was thereafter totally ostracized. Peer pressure
reached such a point that on the night of the play Shauna burst into tears on
stage and the curtain had to be lowered. In the Christmas Nativity Tableau,
Betsy Cline was Mary, and her teacher sighed with relief.
“Thank the Lord we’ve got one little actress without temperament,” she
told everyone.
Betsy was being asked for dates by the time she was eleven, and once
in high school she was the only freshman to attend the senior prom. Adults
considered her unspoiled and wholesome. Her contemporaries liked her for
her sparkle and charm. The fact that she was not traditionally pretty helped
her popularity, for it kept boys from being uncomfortable around her and
girls from being jealous.
“Cute” was the word people used for her, and it was the way she
thought of herself.
“I’d rather be cute than beautiful,” she had said once to her mother,
who had smiled and agreed.
“It lasts longer,” Mrs. Cline had told her. “Prettiness fades, but a girl
can be cute right into middle age.”
There were only two people she knew who seemed immune to Betsy’s
cuteness, and one was Mr. Griffin. This semester, for the first time in her
life, she had found her papers getting marked down for such things as “lack
of originality” and “overuse of clichés.”
“I don’t know what he means,” she had complained to her parents, who
were as bewildered as she. “What’s wrong with saying things the way other
people have if it’s the best way to say them? You can’t just make words up
out of the air.”
Her mother had written Mr. Griffin a note requesting that he “go easier
on Betsy, who is very sensitive to criticism,” and her father had offered to
go to the principal and have her moved to another section of senior English.
Betsy had left the note in Mr. Griffin’s box in the office. She found it
later, returned with one of her papers, with a notation on the bottom that
said, “The best way to avoid criticism is not to earn it.” The paper had
received a D.
She had turned down her father’s offer, saying, “It just isn’t right to
change classes. If one person does it, then everybody will want to.” The
truth was that she would not have left the class for anything in the world. It
was the only class all day that she had with Mark Kinney.
Mark was the other person in Betsy’s life who did not seem to notice
her cuteness. At first she had thought it was because of Lana. There were
boys who were attracted only to older women, and Lana, a college
sophomore, had had a certain sophistication about her that Betsy could
never equal. But after the thing had happened last semester, when Mr.
Griffin had recognized Mark’s term paper as one he had read several years
before when he was teaching at the University of Albuquerque and had
carried the thing to such extremes—dropping Mark from the class,
checking with the college English Department to determine who had access
to the file of past papers—Lana’s father had had her transferred to a small
college in the southern part of the state.
“I want her out from under that boy’s influence,” he had been heard to
say. “He’s a sick kid. My daughter would never have thought of rifling that
file if he hadn’t put her up to it. She’s obsessed by him. If he told her to
jump out a window, she’d do it. It’s gone far enough, and I want her out of
here, now.”
So Lana was out of the picture, and Betsy was secretly overjoyed.
Surely now Mark would notice her as someone more than just a girl who
had hooked up with his best friend. But it did not seem to happen. Nor did
Mark appear to grieve particularly over the loss of Lana. He remained the
same as he had always been—cool, expressionless, in complete control of
every situation—except the one in which he had been forced by Mr. Griffin
to plead for reentry to the class. He accepted Betsy, as he always had, as
part of a group of which he himself was the center. But he made no effort to
see her alone or to advance their relationship any further.
Well, she was worth noticing, and today, Betsy thought, shehad proved
it. It was she who had provided the alibis for them all.
“We’ll use my tape recorder,” she had told them, “and we’ll be able to
plant voices anywhere we want them.” She had even thought through to the
disposal of the cake.
“No originality, huh?” she had remarked to herself with satisfaction.
“This should be original enough for anybody.”
And it had gone almost perfectly. When her mother got home from her
card game, three dirty plates in the sink would testify to the fact that three
hungry teenagers had spent the afternoon there. She had left the house in
Jeff ’s car in plenty of time to make the action at the school ground. She
even had her own nylon stocking mask in her purse. It was the stupid
policeman who had fouled up everything by stopping her when she was
barely enough over the speed limit to register on the speedometer.
The more she thought about it the angrier she became, and by the time
she reached the clearing where Mark had parked Mr. Griffin’s dull green
Chevrolet her initial enthusiasm was masked by fury.
She ran the car up to a point where it paralleled Mr. Griffin’s, gave the key
a twist, and got out. The entrance to the path, widened by the unusual
amount of traffic, was no longer completely concealed by the rock. Quickly
Betsy shoved aside the few interfering branches and began the short hike
that would take her back to the waterfall.
The condition of the path showed that Mr. Griffin had not been led
along it without a struggle. The earth was scuffed and in places bushes
were trampled and broken. At one spot there had evidently been a major
scuffle, for there was an imprint in the soft earth as though someone had
fallen heavily, and on the ground were some scattered coins that had
apparently tumbled from a pocket. A few feet farther there lay a plastic
bottle containing several pills. Betsy picked the bottle up, noting that the
name on the label was “Brian Griffin.”
She hastened her footsteps, and suddenly she was upon them. Pulling
herself to a halt, she drew in her breath with a combination of shock and
delight. There on the ground before her, tied and blindfolded, lay Mr.
Griffin. The startling part was that he did not look much different than he
did in the classroom. The blindfold across his eyes only slightly diminished
the severity of the sharp nose, the neat mustache, the straight, firm mouth.
His shirt and jacket were smeared with dirt, but the neatly knotted tie was
perfectly in place.
Betsy’s mood of anger fell away as though it had never existed.
“It’s just like he was getting ready to give a lecture!” she breathed in
amazement.
Jeff motioned her to silence. Coming over to stand beside her, he said in
a low voice, “You can’t talk out like that. You’ve got to put on an accent or
talk through your nose or something. We don’t want him to recognize our
voices, remember?” He glanced behind her. “Where’s Sue?”
“She wouldn’t come.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. She just didn’t want to. She looked like she’d been
crying.”
“That’s all we need, to have her crack up on us.” Jeff put an arm around
her shoulders. “I’m glad you’re a girl with guts. Griffin’s a fighter. He’s not
the pushover we thought he’d be. We may have to rough him up a little to
get him where we want him.”
“I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Betsy said excitedly. She found
her breath coming faster as she and Jeff moved closer to the man on the
ground, standing so that they could stare down into his face.
Mark and David were on their knees beside him.
“So how does it feel?” Mark was asking in a high, nasal twang, as
though he had just been imported from the back hills of the Ozarks. “How
do you like it being on the ground for a change? It’s not so great is it, being
down where people can walk on you? Well, now you know how your
students feel all the time.”
Mr. Griffin lay silent. Only the straining of the tendons in his neck
showed that he was conscious and listening.
“Well, how does it feel?” Mark repeated. “We want an answer. Did you
hear me—sir?”
“Yes, I heard you,” Mr. Griffin said shortly.
“Your answer—sir?”
“My answer,” Mr. Griffin said in his cold, clipped voice, “is that if you
know what’s good for you, you’ll untie this rope this instant. If it’s money
you’re after, I don’t have any on me.”
“We don’t want your money,” David said. “We’re not thieves.”
“What are you then?” Mr. Griffin asked him. “Besides punks and
kidnappers, that is?”
“We are your students, present, past and future,” Mark told him, the
corner of his mouth twitching slightly with the closest Betsy had ever seen
him come to a smile. “We are representatives of every poor kid who has
ever walked into your dungeon of a classroom. We come to bring you ‘the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ We’re here to deliver revenge.”
“If this is a joke,” Mr. Griffin said, “it’s not funny. It’s the sort of
childish demonstration I’d expect from five-year-olds, not high school
seniors. How many of you are there?”
“A lot,” Jeff said. “Twenty—twenty-five—thirty!” He glanced at Betsy
and grinned. “Would you believe fifty—a hundred—everybody who’s ever
had to take a class from you?”
“That’s ridiculous. There can’t be more than three of you. I’ve only
heard three voices. And all of you are boys.”
Mark glanced up at Betsy and nodded.
“Are you sure of that?” she asked, holding her nose as she spoke so that
her voice came out as nasal as Mark’s had been. “I’m not a boy. There are a
lot of us girls who hate you too, you know.”
Mr. Griffin gave a start of surprise. Quite evidently he had not expected
this. “Then there was another car,” he said. “Some of you came in another
car.”
“There are lots of other cars,” Jeff said. “Dozens of them. I told you,
we’re all here. None of us wanted to miss this.”
“Miss what?”
There was a slight pause. Then Mark said, “Nobody wanted to miss
watching you die.”
“You want me to believe that you brought me here to kill me? Just
because you don’t like the way I teach? That’s ridiculous.”
“You used that word before,” David said. “You’re repeating yourself.
You shouldn’t use the same adjective twice in a row like that, you know?”
“You’re sick,” Mr. Griffin said.
“All of us?”
“All of you who are in on this. I’m sure it can’t be the entire class.
There can’t be that many teenage monsters wandering loose around Del
Norte.”
“Talking about ‘sick,’” Betsy volunteered suddenly, “look what I
found!” She held up the pill bottle.
The boys turned to look at her.
“What is it?” Jeff asked.
“A container of pills I found back there on the path. It’s Mr. Griffin’s.
It’s—” She studied the label—“This can’t be right. It says it’s
‘nitroglycerin.’”
“You mean the explosive?” David broke into laughter. “Maybe he was
one jump ahead of us and was planning to blow up the school.”
“ ‘Take one for pain of angina,’” Betsy continued reading. “What’s
that?”
“Yeah, what’s that, Mr. G.?” Mark gave him a hard prod with his balled
fist. “Wake up down there. Don’t take a nap onus.”
“Untie these ropes,” Mr. Griffin said icily.
“I guess he doesn’t want to answer.” Jeff took the pill bottle out of
Betsy’s hand, opened it, and poured a few pills into the palm of his own
hand. “Is this stuff really nitroglycerin? Will it blow up?”
There was no response from the man on the ground.
“Let’s try it and see.” Bending down, he placed the pills in a small pile
on the top of a flat rock. He picked up another, smaller rock and held it
poised over them. “How high will it blow, Mr. G.? Is this gonna shake the
forest?”
“It won’t detonate,” Mr. Griffin said. “There’s not enough explosive in
those to amount to anything. They’re for medical use only.”
“They won’t explode, huh? Well, we’ll see about that. Stand back,
everybody.” Jeff brought the stone down hard and the pills crumbled into
powder. “Well, hey, now, he was telling the truth. Nothing happened.”
“Put those back in my pocket,” Mr. Griffin said.
“He can’t. They’re gone.” David was leaning over him, reaching to
check the rope around his wrists. He paused and then asked in his natural
voice, “What’s that ring?”
“My wedding band.”
“No, the other ring. The one with the tree on it. I’ve seen that before
someplace.”
“Watch your voice,” Mark hissed.
“What’s the ring with the tree?” David struggled to force his voice into
an accent that was a mixture of French and Spanish, but his eyes did not
move from Mr. Griffin’s right hand. “Have you always worn that ring?”
“It’s my college ring. Yes, I’ve always worn it. How long are you going
to keep playing this game? Take off the blindfold. I want to see who you
are.”
“How about begging us, Mr. Griffin?” Mark said quietly.
“Begging you? To take off the blindfold?”
“We want to hear you beg.” Mark’s eyes were shining dark pockets
under the half-lowered lids. “To take off the blindfold, sure. To untie you,
sure. But isn’t there something more worth begging for? Like your life?”
“You really want me to believe you’re planning to commit murder?”
“You’d better believe it, because it’s true.”
“Why? What would you gain by doing an insane thing like that?”
“I told you before—revenge. Revenge for every stingy, cruel, rotten,
stinking thing you’ve ever done to us, any of us. You made us crawl—now,
you shit, we’re going to make you crawl. Beg us, Mr. G.! Plead with us!
Let’s hear you whine!”
“I most certainly will not,” Mr. Griffin said.
“God, he’s a stubborn bastard,” Jeff said under his breath to Betsy.
“You’ve almost got to like him a little, you know?”
“I don’t like him.” She moved closer and bent over, studying the man’s
face. She had never been this close to Mr. Griffin before. She could see the
afternoon growth of hair prickling beneath the smooth white skin and the
black mustache moving slightly with the breath from his nostrils. His neck
was thin and pale and his Adam’s apple jutted out like a doorknob. She
thought, he’s ugly. Even uglier than the policeman. In her mind the two
images drew together, overlapped, and became one. If she were to remove
the blindfold, she knew she would find beneath it the policeman’s cold,
insolent stare.
“Make him cry,” she said to Mark. “I want to see him cry.”
“He’ll cry, all right. We’ll make him cry if it takes a week.” Mark’s face
was flushed and feverish looking. “How about a nice, slow death, Mr. G.?
Like lying right here on the ground and starving to death?”
“I don’t believe you would do that. You have too much to lose.”
“We don’t have anything at all to lose. All we have to do is go home
and leave you here. Nobody will ever find you. Nobody knows about this
place but us.”
The man on the ground made no answer.
“Look,” Jeff said, aside to Mark, “time’s running out on us. We need to
get back if the things we’ve set up are going to work. Maybe we ought to
loosen the ropes so he can work his way out of them and take off. What do
you think?”
“I think you’re nuts,” Mark said. “He doesn’t get out of here till he
begs. We agreed on that.”
“But it doesn’t look like he’s going to.”
“He’s going to. Don’t you worry your head about that. He’ll break.”
“But we’re out of time.”
“Then we’ll leave him,” Mark said.
“Leave him? You mean right here?”
“It’s as good a place as any.”
Mark got to his feet. “Do you hear that, Mr. G.? You’re in for a long,
cold night. Want to change your mind?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Your wife will worry about you.”
“I’m sure she will. She’ll also call the police.”
“A lot of good that will do her. They’ll never look for you here, you can
be sure of that.” Mark dropped his hand to David’s shoulder. “Hey, what’s
with you? Wake up, man.”
“I’m with you.” David got up slowly. “Look, let’s have a talk.”
“What about? There’s nothing to talk over.”
“Yes, there is. Come down this way.” He drew Mark a few yards
downstream and dropped his voice. “We can’t do that. It’s carrying the
game too far. Why don’t we take him back now, the way we planned? He
won’t forget today, that’s for sure. We’ve scared him plenty. That’s what we
were after, wasn’t it?”
“He hasn’t begged yet. He’s got to beg.”
“That really doesn’t matter, does it? I mean, just saying the words?”
“It matters to me.” Mark’s voice was like a gray steel knife. “He made
me beg, remember? ‘Please, Mr. G., let me back into your class. I’ll be a
good boy. I won’t cheat again.’ And then he wouldn’t do it. ‘Next
semester,’ he said. ‘Next semester you can take it over again.’ He had me
where he wanted me, didn’t he? No English credit, no graduation. And the
principal backed him up. No other English class would do. It was Griffin’s
or nothing. Remember?”
“I remember. But, my God, Mark—”
“He’s going to beg. And he’s going to stay here until he does.”
Jeff and Betsy had moved to join them, catching the end of his
statement.
“But what if he never does?” Jeff asked. “He’s tougher than we
bargained for. We can’t just leave him here till he starves.”
“He’ll break before then.” Beneath the heavy lids, Mark’s eyes were
glistening. “Look, if we let him go now, he’s won.”
“Mark’s right,” Betsy said. “He thinks he’s really something. He called
us ‘five-year-olds.’ He thinks we’re ‘ridiculous.’”
“But how long can we keep him here?”
“Long enough to crack him. He will break,” Mark said determinedly. “I
promise you that. He’ll break, and he’ll beg, and he’ll crawl, just the way
we planned, and when he gets back in that classroom he’ll be a shell, man,
just a shell. He’ll look out at that class, and he’ll know somewhere out
there, scattered around behind those Shakespeare books, there are a bunch
of kids who watched him crawl. He’ll know they’re picturing him here on
the ground, begging. Don’t you think that’s going to do something to him?”
“Don’t go soft, Jeff,” Betsy said. “You’re the one who was talking
about having ‘guts.’”
“I’m not going soft,” Jeff said defensively. “It’s Dave who said we
should take him back.”
“Well—I still don’t like it,” David said. “If we do leave him awhile,
we’ll have to come back up here later. It can’t be all night.”
“I’ve got a game tonight,” Jeff said. “And Betsy’s got to cheer. We can
come back up after that.”
“It’ll be like midnight!”
“So?” Mark said. “That’ll give him plenty of time to thinkthings over—
to wonder if we’re ever coming. Are you with me?”
“Of course,” Betsy said.
“It’s not so long,” Jeff said. “Like, till midnight isn’t that long. Maybe
seven hours.”
“Dave?”
“I guess I don’t have a choice, do I?” David said. “I’m outvoted.”
“Damned right you are.” Mark turned on his heel and walked back
upstream to where Mr. Griffin lay, unmoving, by the waterfall. “Goodnight,
Mr. G. Enjoy your own company. It’s all you’re going to have for a long
time. Here’s your last chance. Going to ask us, ‘pretty please’ to let you
go?”
The man on the ground did not answer.
“To hell with you, then—sir,” Mark said. “Come on, you guys.”
He led the way, and the others fell into step behind him.
Betsy turned to throw one last look at the man by the stream. He was
lying very still. Only his chest was moving—up and down—up and down
—as though he had been running hard.
Betsy had a sudden childish impulse to run back and step on his face.
CHAPTER 8
At three thirty the four of them got into Jeff’s car and
drove into the mountains. The afternoon was warm and still, and the air that
poured in through the open windows smelled of pine needles and sunshine.
“Don’t you feel like we are playing the same scene twice?” Jeff asked.
“It’s like last Saturday all over again. You’re even all sitting in the same
places in the car.”
“I wish it was last Saturday,” David said wistfully. “I wish we could go
back to then and start all over.”
“There’s one nice difference,” said Betsy. “The creep’s not with us.
How come you let her slide out, Mark? She’s in this as much as the rest of
us. Why doesn’t she have to do some of the dirty work too?”
“She couldn’t take it,” Mark said.
“So you’re babying her? That’s not fair.” Betsy’s mouth puckered into a
pout. “If Sue can get out of this part, why shouldn’t I? I’m a girl too.”
“It’s not that,” Mark said impatiently. “There’s no ‘fair’ about it. It’s
just that Sue’s at the freak-out point, and it’s not going to take much to push
her over. If she does crack, she runs and tells her dad the whole story.
Besides, she’s done her bit today. She had a scene with the cops this
morning.”
“I hope she didn’t blow it,” Jeff muttered.
“She didn’t. I talked with her afterward. She fed them exactly what I
told her to.”
“Who couldn’t do that?” Betsy said. “It doesn’t take an Academy
Award–winning actress. With that soft little voice of hers and those big,
nearsighted cow eyes blinking behind those glasses—”
“Cut it out,” David broke in sharply. “Don’t talk about her that way.”
“Why not? Don’t tell me you like her, I don’t believe it! Not you—not
her—it’s impossible!”
“She’s a nice girl.”
“Oh, I’m sure she is. So nice she can’t dirty her hands digging a hole in
the ground or moving the car or anything like that. All she can do is sit on
her ass and cry and slobber all over Mark’s shirt and—”
“I said, cut it out!” David repeated angrily, and Jeff, glancing over at
her in surprise, said, “What’s got into you, Bets? You’re sure in a shitty
mood. None of us are looking forward to this part, but it’s got to be done,
and you said yourself it’s good not having Sue along.”
“Okay, now,” Mark said, cutting off the conversation with a gesture of
his hand, “we’re almost to the clearing. There ahead—right around the
bend.” He strained forward in the seat. “There’s the car. Did you bring the
key, Jeff ?”
“Sure. I wouldn’t come without that.”
“Okay, pull up next to it here and let’s get going. We don’t have a
whole lot of time if we want to blend in with the five o’clock traffic.
You’ve got the shovel?”
“In the trunk.”
“Just one?”
“It’s all I could find,” Jeff said. “We’ll have to take turns with it.”
“Well, get it and follow along behind us, then. Dave and I’ll go ahead
and check the place over for the best spot for digging.”
When they reached the waterfall, Betsy gave a little gasp and covered
her face with her hands. “Oh, god—there are flies on him!”
“What did you expect?” Mark said, amused. “He doesn’t know the
difference.”
“Ugh—it’s grotesque. I’m going downstream to sit and watch the
water.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “I’ve never seen a dead person
before except at a funeral.”
“This is a sort of funeral,” Mark said. “Dave, where do you think?
Right by the bank over there?”
“I guess so,” David said, swallowing hard.
“There aren’t many rocks there, which will make it easier. Here comes
Jeff. You want to start us off, man? You’re the tower of strength among us.
How about breaking ground there by the stream?”
“Good enough, but I’m not doing the whole thing.” Jeff stuck the
corner of the shovel into the earth and turned up a lump of soil. “I wish I
had a spade. A pointed tip would sure make things easier.”
“Well, we don’t have one, so dig in with what you’ve got. Dave, give
me a hand and let’s roll the guy over. There’s no sense burying a wallet full
of cash along with him.”
“Is that it, in the hip pocket?” David asked grimly.
“Yeah, here it is. A real beat-up old thing, isn’t it? Hell, there’s only a
couple of bucks and a blank check and some credit cards. Too bad we can’t
use those. Hey—” Mark’s face brightened “—that gives me a great idea!
There’s a guy I know up in Denver where I used to live who can copy a
signature. I mean, once when I was pretty young I got him to write a check
and sign my dad’s name to it, and the two of us had spending money for a
month before the bank statement came in and my old man caught on to
what had happened. This guy and I have kept in touch, and I bet if I sent
him Mr. G.’s credit cards he wouldn’t say no to buying himself a few nice
things with them. Then, the first of the month, in will come the bills to Mrs.
G. with her husband’s signature right there big as life, charging things from
stores in Colorado. Wouldn’t that freak out everybody?”
“Man, you’re a genius.” Jeff was beginning to breathe hard as he dug.
“Say, I’m starting to feel like one of the grave-diggers in Hamlet. ‘Alas,
poor Griffin, I knew him, Horatio.’ Somebody else take a turn.”
“You dig awhile, Dave,” Mark said. “Let’s see, when I send the credit
cards I’d better send along the driver’s license for I.D. Let me check what
else is in here. A library card—we don’t need that. Here’s a picture of some
woman, maybe his wife. Not bad-looking. I wonder what she saw in Mr.
G.?”
“Don’t ask me,” Jeff said. “You think Betsy’s okay?”
“Sure. She’s tough. Where’d she go, anyway?”
“She’s down there at the place where we had the picnic.”
“Maybe you’d better go talk to her,” Mark said. “We can’t have her
getting weird on us. We’re going to need her to drive down one of the
cars.”
Jeff walked downstream to where Betsy sat, dipping her hand in the
water. She lifted her arm and held it suspended, letting the shining silver
droplets fall back into the stream.
“You playing at being Ophelia?” Jeff asked.
“Don’t joke, Jeff. This is just sickening. I’m sitting here trying not to
throw up.”
“It didn’t bother you this way before,” Jeff said.
“That was before I saw him. It was all like a story then, just something
Mark made up and we all went along with. It was even sort of exciting. I
didn’t picture him like that, all stiff and his eyes wide open and flies. I
don’t see why Sue got out of coming up here and I had to.”
“Mark explained,” Jeff said. “You want Sue to crack and blab on us?”
“I don’t think that’s the real reason. You saw how she was with Mark
last night, hanging on to him and crying and being all helpless, and the way
he fussed over her—‘Susie, it’s all right, baby; it’s all right, sweetie.’”
“It worked, didn’t it? He got her simmered down. What’s it to you,
anyway? Mark’s not your private property.”
“I don’t like to see him lowering himself that way. It’s degrading.”
“That’s a weird thing to say.” Jeff gave her an odd look. “Whose
girlfriend are you anyway, Mark’s or mine?”
“That’s a stupid question.”
“So, I’m stupid. Or maybe I’m just beginning to get over being stupid.”
There was a strange, flat note to his voice. “How long has it been since
we’ve been out anywhere without Mark? Weeks? Months, maybe? How
about last week when I wanted to see that motorcycle flick, and Mark had
already seen it, and you said you didn’t want to go and we should pick
something else to do so Mark could be in on it?”
“He’s your best friend, isn’t he? I didn’t want him to feel left out.”
“The way you’re acting, you’d think he was your best friend.”
“Jeffrey Garrett, you’re talking like some sort of jealous—”
“Hey, Jeff !” Mark’s voice rang down to them, faint against the sound
of the rushing water. “Come here and take over the digging, will you?
Dave’s exhausted.”
“You’d better pull yourself together,” Jeff said gruffly to Betsy,
“because you’re going to be driving one of the cars.” He turned on his heel
and strode back upstream to where David stood, leaning on the shovel,
staring down morosely into the shallow pit that was the result of their
efforts.
“You didn’t make much headway,” Jeff told him irritably.
“I did my best. My arms are about to fall off.”
“Time’s running out on us, Jeff,” Mark said. “You’ll have to finish this
up. Another foot or so should do it, I think.”
“It better,” Jeff growled, “because I’m not taking it down any farther.”
He took the shovel from David’s hands and began to plunge it into the earth
with great, ferocious stabs.
“Thatta boy,” Mark said. “At this rate we’ll have it done in no time.”
He stood watching, his hands in his pockets. Suddenly he smiled. “I wish I
had my iPod.”
“Why’s that?”
“A little music makes work go faster. Besides, there’s always music at
funerals. We could pick out some good songs for this one. ‘Down by the
Old Mill Stream’ would be appropriate, or that Scottish thing, ‘Where, oh,
where, has my highland laddie gone?’”
“Some joke,” Jeff muttered. But a moment later he smiled slightly also.
“Yeah, and that old group, the Grateful Dead, could lead the singing. That’s
from Griffin’s era, isn’t it?”
“Good one. Then just ’specially for Betsy they’d do ‘Brush Away the
Blue-Tail Fly.’”
Mark was hyper, running on a frequency above all of them. His eyes
were shining so that their gray glittered like silver. He rocked back and
forth from his toes to his heels, anticipating each shovelful of dirt as it was
lifted from the grave.
“That should do it,” he said after a time. “It would be better if it were
deeper, but there isn’t time for that. Let’s lower in the body. Dave, what are
you doing there?”
“Just—just—” David was kneeling beside the dead man. He glanced
up, almost guiltily. “I thought—his eyes—ought to be closed.”
“That’s a nice gesture.” Mark turned to Jeff. “Go call Betsy up here. We
can’t let her miss the last chapter.”
“She’s pretty shook up, Mark. I think we ought to let herbe.”
“Okay, if you say so. You know her better than I do. What’s that you’re
doing now, Dave?”
David had taken off his Windbreaker and laid it over the face of the
man on the ground.
“This will keep the dirt off him.”
“He won’t know the difference.”
“I will though,” David said stiffly. “I don’t want the dirt to be right on
his face.”
“Suit yourself. It’s your jacket. Are we ready? Jeff, get a grip under his
shoulders. Dave, get his feet.”
“I don’t want to,” David said. “You do it.”
“It’s almost over, man!”
“I said, you do it.”
David turned abruptly and started back along the path toward the
clearing. The thin, golden rays of the late afternoon sun fell on his back and
shoulders, but the air had already grown cool enough to make him shiver.
The hands at his sides were gripped into fists, fingernails biting into the
palms. He could still feel the shape of the shovel handle as his fingers
curled around it.
“It has to be done,” Mark had said, and it was true, and “He doesn’t
know the difference,” and that was true also. If the words the Reverend
Chandler spoke from the pulpit were correct, the body they had come to
bury was no more than the deserted shell of the man. Somewhere, even
now, the soul of Brian Griffin soared high and free into eternal glory, the
anguish of his last hours on earth of no more significance in retrospect than
the discomfort of his birth.
We should have said a prayer, David thought, and since he could not
bring himself to turn and go back, he began to recite one, drawing comfort
from the familiarity of the words that he had murmured nightly since
babyhood.
“Our Father—which art in heaven—hallowed be Thy name—”
He reached the end of the path and stepped out into the clearing where
the two cars stood side by side. He started first for Jeff’s car and then, on
impulse, opened instead the door of the Chevrolet and climbed in behind
the steering wheel. In times past he had sometimes amused himself by
contemplating how cars often seemed extensions of the people who owned
them. There was Jeff’s car, large and loud and flashy, and David’s
mother’s, compact, economical and serviceable. Betsy’s mother’s Honda
was small and fitful, a nervous little automobile, painted an eye-striking
teal.
Now, in Brian Griffin’s car, he closed his eyes and tried to feel the
presence of the man who had driven it, hoping for one last image of
warmth and life. It did not come. The car was as cold and devoid of
personality as the thing in the grave by the waterfall.
“We didn’t do it,” David whispered. “It was an accident, something that
would have happened anyway. We weren’t responsible.” He kept
whispering it over and over, and somehow he worked it into the prayer so
that the two became one—“forgive us our trespasses—we didn’t do it—
deliver us from evil—it was an accident.” He kept his eyes closed,
mouthing the words in a desperate attempt to project them into space. “For
Thine is the kingdom—we were not responsible. Please, please, believe
me, it would have happened anyhow.”
He heard their voices as they came back along the path, and opened his
eyes and saw them approaching. Mark was in the lead, a strange Mark, no
longer the cool, sullen, self-contained young man with the sleepy eyes, but
a vivacious, sparkling Mark, talking and talking.
Who is that person? David asked himself as he watched the boy come
striding toward him across the clearing. I have never seen that person
before. It was as though the life that had left Mr.Griffin had spilled over
into Mark Kinney, and he was filled suddenly with an uncontainable double
portion. Behind him, Jeff seemed almost stolid, and Betsy was tight-faced
and expressionless.
“There you are,” Mark said as he reached the car. “What did you run
off for? Well, it’s over and done now, and all that’s left is the bit with the
car. Bets, you drive down Griffin’s and Jeff and I will follow along and
pick you up at the north end of the airport parking lot.”
“Why me?” Betsy asked. “I’ve never driven that car.”
“You won’t have any trouble with it. I’m sure it drives fine. If I could,
I’d keep it for myself, but that’s not worth the risk. You drive it because
you’re a girl and nobody’s going to expect a girl to be driving around in
Mr. G.’s car. Dave, you go along with her. When you reach the airport, pull
into the lower lot where they have the long-term parking. Wipe your prints
off the steering wheel and anything else you may have handled. Leave the
car unlocked and the key in the ignition.”
“Why should they leave the key?” Jeff asked. “Somebody might rip it
off.”
“That’s the whole idea,” Mark said with a grin. “Can you think of a
better way to get rid of a car than to have somebody steal it?”
“If the guy who takes it gets picked up with it—”
“That’s his problem, not ours.”
“That’s not bad.” Jeff regarded Mark with grudging respect. “You’ve
really thought out everything.”
“The thing that bothers me is, what if I get stopped?” Betsy protested.
“The police are bound to be looking for the car by this time. What do I say
if somebody spots us?”
“Nobody will if you do your job right,” Mark told her. “Drive slowly
and carefully and don’t do anything to draw attention. Join the line of cars
coming out of the factories. Dave will be with you to keep his eye peeled
for cops. He’ll spot them before they spot you, and if you see one, pull into
the first driveway you see as though you lived there, and wait till he
passes.”
“All right,” Betsy agreed nervously.
David slid over on the seat and let her in behind the wheel. They had
little to say to each other. Betsy started the engine, and they drove back
down to the highway and followed the line of the mountain range north and
west until it intersected with Coors Road. There, as Mark had predicted,
they were immediately caught up in a stream of traffic that swept them
anonymously past the outer edges of town.
They reached the airport and pulled into the lot, with Betsy leaning out
of the open car window to take the ticket projected from the dispenser at
the gate.
“Where shall I park? Does it matter?”
“I can’t think why. Any space should do.” Suddenly, David caught his
breath. “Our luck’s run out on us. There’s a police car behind us.”
“Right here in the lot!” Betsy glanced in the rearview mirror and her
face went ashen, the freckles standing out like bright blobs of paint. “He
followed us in! Or—did he? Maybe he’s just here to park like anyone else
while he goes into the terminal for something. What should I do?”
“You don’t have a choice. Just park somewhere. If you turn around now
and drive out again it will catch his attention for sure.”
“Here’s a space,” Betsy said. “Is he still behind us?”
“No, he’s pulling on past. I think you’re right, he’s going to park.”
“Oh, thank god!” She pulled the car carefully into the empty parking
place and turned off the ignition. “Let’s get out and go!”
“First we’ve got to get rid of our fingerprints.”
“That will take forever!”
“No it won’t. We haven’t touched much. Don’t get panicky.” David ran
the edge of his shirt swiftly around the circle of the steering wheel and
along the window ledges. Then he wiped off the key. “Anything else?”
“No, nothing. Let’s get going.”
Using their clothing as a shield between their hands and the metal
handles of the doors, they opened the doors and got out of the car. The
police car was parked two rows over and several spaces to the north. The
driver had just climbed out and was crossing the lot in the direction of the
airport.
“We’ll have to walk right by him,” Betsy whispered.
“That’s okay,” David told her. “If he recognized the car he’d have done
something by now. He’s just another guy stopping to pick up somebody.”
He took her arm. “Walk slowly, keep your eyes on my face, and keep
talking. He won’t even notice us.”
“What can I talk about? My mind’s gone blank.”
“About school. About the game the other night. It doesn’t matter, just
talk. And for Christ’s sake, smile!”
Amazingly, she did—the bright, full, cheerleader smile that was her
trademark. It lit up her face as though she had pressed a light switch.
“It was the most exciting game!” she said breathlessly. “You can’t
imagine how close it was! Right up until the last two minutes we were neck
and neck. Then, Jeff got the ball, and he went charging down the floor and
—”
“Afternoon, Miss Cline,” the policeman said pleasantly as he passed
them.
CHAPTER 13
Detective Baca held the plastic pill bottle carefully with his handkerchief
and turned it so that he could examine the label.
“Now, where exactly did you say you found this?”
“Up in the mountains at a place I like to go sometimes,” the girl told
him. “My fiancé and I went up there to have a picnic.”
“It was lying by the edge of the stream,” the young man said. “I
wouldn’t even have noticed it, but Lana said, ‘How funny. Somebody’s
been up here.’ She picked it up and read the name and said she knows the
guy the label was made out to.”
“You know Brian Griffin personally?” Jim Baca asked thegirl.
“Well, not exactly. I’ve never actually met him, but a friend of mine
took a class from him last year and had some—problems. I was—sort of—
involved in the situation, and I remembered the name. Then last night it
was on TV about his being missing, and it was in the paper this morning.”
“It’s a comparatively new prescription,” the detective remarked. “It’s
dated last month. And the label looks pretty clean for having been lying
outside. Why were you so surprised to find it where you did?”
“It’s not a public picnic area,” the girl said. “It’s way back from the
road, and the only way you can get there is to go down a little path that’s
hidden by some bushes. I just didn’t think anybody knew about the place.”
“How did you know about it?”
“I came onto it about a year ago. I was with a guy—a boy I used to date
—and we were hiking, and we came through the woods and all of a sudden,
there was this waterfall. It was really pretty, and we went back a few times
after that.” She glanced over at the boy beside her. “Today—well, I wanted
to show it to Chris.”
“Lana and I go to school in Portales,” the boy volunteered. “We’re here
over spring break, staying with her parents. They’re nice people and all; it’s
just that it can get sort of difficult—you know?—not ever being alone
together. So, Lana said she knew this private place, and—well—we just
thought we’d go there.”
“I guess, maybe, it was silly, bringing this down to the police station,”
the girl said, half apologetically. “Chris thought it was. I mean, it’s just a
little bottle. It doesn’t even have anything in it.”
“It wasn’t silly at all,” Jim Baca told her. “It may or may not turn out to
be important, but it certainly wasn’t ‘silly.’ Now, what about the rest of the
area? Was there anything else lying around up there? Sandwich wrappers,
beer cans, anything like that? Something to indicate that people had been
there partying?”
“No,” the girl said. “But there was another strange thing. There’s this
big patch of ground with the earth turned up, like people were digging for
something.”
***
“Well, it’s about time you got here,” Mark said shortly. “Where’s Jeff ?”
“He’ll be late,” Betsy said, sliding into the booth across from him. “He
had practice.”
“Practice! He doesn’t think this is important enough to cut practice
for?”
“You told us all to keep on doing the things we usually do,” David
reminded him. “You said if we didn’t it would start people wondering.”
“Betsy, here, has already started them wondering, if what you told me
last night is right.” Mark’s face was dark with fury.
“What do you mean?” Susan asked in a whisper. “What’s Betsy done?”
“She got herself a speeding ticket.”
“What’s so awful about that?” Betsy asked blankly. “Lots of people get
tickets.”
“You never even told us!”
Betsy glanced wide-eyed from Mark’s face, to David’s, and back again.
“I didn’t think it was important.”
“Not important!” Mark said hoarsely. “It explodes the whole alibi! How
could you be home hanging out with Jeff and me, when you’re out getting a
speeding ticket a block away from the school?”
“Hey—cool it,” David said in a low voice. “Maria’s coming for our
order.”
“Hi there, gang!” The pert, dark-eyed waitress greeted them pleasantly.
“How are our most regular customers this afternoon? What can I get you?”
“What do you want, Sue?” David asked her.
“Nothing. I’m not hungry.”
“Cokes for everybody,” Mark said.
“Large or small?”
“It doesn’t matter. Small’s fine.” He pressed his lips together tightly
until the girl had moved away from the table, and then leaned forward,
letting his breath out in a soft hiss. “Okay, Bets, now give us the story. How
much does this cop know about you?”
“Nothing,” Betsy said nervously. “Honestly, Mark, it was just such a
little thing I never even thought about it afterward. I was driving over to the
school, and I was afraid I’d be late, and I guess I gave it a little more gas
than I should have.”
“I didn’t ask you how it happened, I asked what the guy knows about
you. How much did you talk to him?”
“Hardly at all. Just about the ticket.”
“You tried to talk him out of it?”
“Well, sure. I mean, after all, my father is a County Commissioner.”
“And you told him that? ‘My daddy’s Harold Cline—he’s on the
County Commission—you don’t dare ticket me’? You actually sat there,
feeding him that sort of information?”
Betsy’s face was her answer.
“Christ, no wonder he remembered you,” Mark said savagely. “You
rubbed that name right into his mind with a piece of sandpaper. So the next
day he sees you and Dave in the airport parking lot, and he comes right out
with it. ‘Here’s Miss Cline again.’”
“He didn’t say that,” Betsy said. “He said, ‘Good afternoon,’ or
something like that. It wasn’t any big deal.”
“But he saw you, and he knew you. He saw you get out of Griffin’s car,
Dave says. In fact, he got a good long look at the car. He followed you right
into the parking lot. Right?”
“That’s right,” David said, “but I don’t think he really noticed much. If
he’d recognized the car as one on the wanted list, he’d have reacted right
then. He’d have asked us for the registration or something.”
“He may not have recognized it right off,” Mark said, “but you can be
damned sure he’s got it wedged into some corner of his brain, just the way
he wedged in Betsy’s name. All it’ll take now is for one of his superiors to
read out the description during briefing, and out it’ll come. ‘Hey,’ he’ll say,
‘I’ve seen a car like that. It’s down at the airport.’”
“What can we do?” Susan asked. “Go down and move it?”
“We’ll have to. There’s no time now to sit around and wait for some
dude to rip it off. But where can we stow it? Christ, Betsy, I’d like to
strangle you.”
“I’m sorry,” Betsy said contritely. “I didn’t mean to make problems.”
“So you didn’t mean to; a lot of good that does us! Well, put your mind
to it and see what you can come up with. We’ve got to find a safe place to
stow that car, and we’ve got to do itnow.”
“We could paint it and maybe sell it,” Susan said.
“Without the title? You must be nuts.”
“What about dumping it out on an Indian reservation?” David
suggested. “You know, they’re private land. The police can’t go poking
around on them without special permission from their governors. A car
could sit there for a long time without being reported.”
“Which reservation? The closest is Sandia Pueblo, and that’s too small.
They know every car that comes in and out. Zuni’s bigger, but who wants
to drive a hot car a couple of hundred miles on interstate highways to reach
it?”
“I have an idea,” Betsy said. “Let’s take it out on the mesa and scrap it.
I mean, just tear it apart, knock it into pieces, and scatter them.”
“With what, a sledgehammer? Should we cut it up into half-inch hunks
with a metal saw? How many years do you think that would take us, if we
ever did get it done?”
“Well, you suggest something,” David said. “You’re the big idea guy.”
“I did think of something—the airport. It would have been perfect too,
if Betsy hadn’t screwed things up for us. Okay, we’re stuck now. The best I
can come up with is that we stick it in the Garretts’ garage.”
“In their garage!” Betsy exclaimed. “Why, that’s not hiding it! Jeff ’s
parents will see it right away.”
“So they see it. Jeff can tell them he’s working on the engine for a
friend.”
“For how long?” David asked skeptically. “For a couple of days? A
week?”
“For as long as it’s got to be before we figure out something else. The
main thing is, we’ve got to get that car out of the airport lot and under
cover fast. When that cop goes back to the lot to look at it, it’s got to be
gone.”
“Jeff ’s parents have a two-car garage,” Betsy said. “Jeff can park his
own car in the driveway. It wouldn’t be the first time; he did some work on
Greg Dart’s car just last month.”
“And while he’s got it he can spray it with paint,” Mark said. “And we
can do something about digging up a different license plate. Yeah, this is
the best answer. If we get the car looking different we can travel with it.
Then maybe we can follow up on Dave’s idea and take it out to Zuni.”
“How do you know Jeff will agree to this?” Susan asked. “Having it
right there in his own garage and everything?”
“He’s got to agree. He doesn’t have a choice.”
“What if his parents recognize it from the description in the paper?”
“They won’t,” Mark said. “There are lots of green Chevies in the world.
Besides, they’ve got no reason to be suspicious ofanything Jeff does. He
messes around with cars all the time.”
“Here comes Maria with the drinks,” David said. “Oh—and there’s
Jeff.” He raised his hand to catch the attention of the boy who had just
come in. Their eyes caught, and Jeff started across the room toward the
table.
He reached them just as the waitress was distributing the last of the
drinks.
“I was wondering where you were,” she said with a smile. “How’s my
best customer today? Hamburger and fries as usual?”
“No,” Jeff said. “Nothing for me.”
“Not even a soda?”
“I said I don’t want anything.”
Betsy slid over to make room for him, and Jeff wedged himself in
beside her. His face was without its usual ruddy coloring, and his mouth
was set strangely.
The others regarded him in silence until Maria had moved out of
earshot. Then Mark asked, “What’s happened?”
“I heard it on the car radio,” Jeff said. “They’ve found it.”
“Then all our worry over where to move it was for nothing,” Betsy
moaned. “What did they say, Jeff ? Was there anything about Dave and me
being seen parking it?”
“They didn’t find the car,” Jeff said hoarsely. “It’s the body. They’ve
found Griffin.”
“That’s impossible,” Mark said. “It’s some kind of trick. Nobody knows
that place but us. There’s no way they could have found him.”
“They said they did. His wife’s identified him. They said his wallet was
missing.”
“I knew it,” Susan whispered. “There’s no way we could have gotten
away with it.”
“They’re guessing about the wallet. It stands to reason, nobody’d dump
a guy without taking his wallet.” Mark’s full attention was on Jeff. “Did
they say where they found him? Did they mention Dave’s Windbreaker?”
“No. It was real brief, just a news flash. They said the wallet was gone
and his Stanford ring was missing from his finger.”
“Well, that proves it’s a trick. We didn’t take any ring. They’re
throwing the whole thing out to see if they can get a reaction. It’s a scare
thing.”
“Do you still want to move the car?” Betsy asked.
“The sooner the better. Jeff will take you to the lot, and you follow him
back to his place. We’re stashing the Chevy in your garage for a while,
Jeff.” Mark was all business.
“I don’t want it at my place,” Jeff objected. “That thing’s hot.”
“There’s no place else. Keep the garage door shut and give it a fast
paint job.” Mark turned to David. “You ride shotgun with Betsy.”
“I can’t,” David said. “I’ve got to get Sue home and get back to my
own place. I told my mom I’d be back by five.”
“What a life you lead. It’s like punching a time clock.” Mark grimaced.
“Okay, I’ll ride shotgun. First I’m going to the men’s room and cut up
Griffin’s credit cards and flush them down the john. And I’m dumping the
wallet in the garbage. And, so help me, Bets, if you get stopped for a ticket
during this ride, you’ve had it.”
“If you don’t think they’ve really found him, why are you getting rid of
everything?” Susan asked in a thin voice.
Mark did not appear to hear her. He got up and left the table.
CHAPTER 15
“John, I want to talk with you about something,” Paula Garrett said. “Jeff
has been up since dawn working out in the garage on Mark Kinney’s car.”
“So?” her husband grunted.
“Tear yourself away from the income taxes and listen to me a moment.
This is Sunday, Jeff ’s one day to relax. He has practice tomorrow and
Tuesday, and Wednesday night is the last day of the tournament.”
“So?” John Garrett said again. “Jeff never misses practice.”
“I know. That’s just my point. He throws himself so hard into his
sports, he needs to get rest when he can. Mark takes advantage of their
friendship to a point where it’s disgraceful, and as far as I can see, Jeff
never gets anything back from it.It’s all give on one side and all take on the
other.”
“You worry too much,” John Garrett said. “What’s this about Mark
Kinney’s car, anyway? I didn’t think the kid had a car. If he’s got his own
wheels, how come Jeff drives him around all the time?”
“Mark just bought the car, or I guess he did,” Paula said. “It’s a beat-up
old thing, purely secondhand. He and Betsy came over in it yesterday
afternoon and drove it straight into the garage. Jeff says he’s going to help
him fix it up, but there’s no ‘helping’ about it. Mark got a phone call from
some girl a couple of minutes after he got here and took off immediately.
Now this morning Jeff ’s out there painting that car all by himself, and it’s
not even his.”
“Jeff likes working on cars. He had some other kid’s car out there for a
while last month. You didn’t hit the roof over that.”
“No, I didn’t, because Greg Dart was out there with him working right
alongside him, and besides that, he paid Jeff for his work. You can be sure
Mark isn’t going to fork over a penny. I bet Jeff ’s even buying the paint.”
“They’ve been friends for a long time, Paula.”
“I know,” Jeff ’s mother said. “I can remember the first time he brought
Mark home with him. I thought then that their friendship couldn’t last a
week. That weird little weasel of a boy and our Jeff—why, they had
nothing in common. Jeff would beout back shooting baskets, and Mark
would be slouching against a tree, staring off into space like he was half-
asleep. I thought Jeff was just being kind because the boy was new in town
and didn’t have parents.”
“Well, likely he was,” her husband said. “And I think it shows the
goodness in Jeff that he’s continued to help the kid. From the things Mark’s
let drop when he’s been over here, I gather he’s got no kind of home life.
He’s got an uncle who beats him and an aunt who won’t fix his meals; the
only nourishment he gets comes from that greasy-spoon diner or out of our
refrigerator. No wonder he’s attached himself to a solid, well-adjusted guy
like Jeff. It’s his anchor in life.”
“Maybe so,” Paula said more slowly. “I could be over-reacting. It’s just
that I’ve never been able to get really fond of Mark. He and Jeff are
together so much, and he’s in and out of here every day, and he’s polite
enough, but I don’t feel I know him at all as a person. Do you?”
“I never thought about it,” John Garrett said. “Maybe there’s not much
there to know. The kid’s a shadow of Jeff, trailing along in his footsteps.
It’s kind of pitiful actually, since he’ll never be able to begin to measure up
to him. You can tell he’s got a crush on Betsy, but what girl would look
twice at him with Jeff around? It’s sort of sad.”
“Well, when you put it that way,” Paula said. “I guess Jeff ’s a big
enough boy now to handle his own relationships. It’s up to the strong in this
life to take care of the weak, isn’t it? And our boy’s pretty special.”
“Darned right he is,” John Garrett said, turning back to his tax return.
“All you have to do is open the paper or pick up a magazine, and you see a
bunch of messed-up kids in trouble. It makes you wonder where the parents
are while all that’s going on.”
Cathy Griffin lay on her back, staring at the ceiling. She had slept,
dreamless, through the night as a result of the sedative they had given her.
When she wakened, it had been slowly, in stages. Consciousness had
inched upon her, first with the knowledge that she was no longer sleeping,
then as she automatically turned and reached into the bed beside her.
It was empty.
He’s up ahead of me, she had thought drowsily, but even as the words
formed in her mind she had known there was something wrong with them.
There were no sounds of movement in the room, no thumps of dresser
drawers being opened and closed. The shower was not running in the
bathroom. There was no hum of an electric razor.
Where is Brian? And then, quickly, she had shoved the question away. I
will not ask myself now. I’m not ready to think about that yet. Desperately
she tried to shove herself back into the safe cocoon of oblivion, but it had
sealed itself behind her. I must sleep—I have to sleep some more! But while
her arms and legs lay weighted upon the mattress, and her body remained a
leaden lump, too heavy to think of lifting, her mind kept opening, inch by
dreadful inch.
Where is Brian? Where—is—Brian? Where—is—he?
I—know. I—know.
There was a crack in the ceiling over the bed. Brian hadbeen planning
to fix it during Easter vacation.
“It won’t take much. Just some sort of plaster filler.”
“You’ll never get around to that and you know it. You have a million
books you’re going to read that week.”
“Well, I’ll make the sacrifice. I’ll hold myself down to a million minus
one, and fix the ceiling. We can’t have the whole roof caving in on top of
Brian Junior.”
In the far corner of the room there was a cobweb, a wisp of lace caught
in a beam of morning sunlight. Had some industrious spider created that
masterpiece overnight, or had it been there, unnoticed, for days? It was
strange the things you saw when you looked at the ceiling—really
concentrated on it to the exclusion of everything else. The plaster ran in
waves and swirls, and here and there, there were little lumps in it, as though
it had been spread too slowly and had dried before it was smoothed.
“People who do halfway jobs shouldn’t do them at all,” Brian used to say.
If Brian had been a plasterer, the swirls in the ceiling would have been
symmetrical and all the lumps would have been smoothed away.
Where is Brian? …I know—I—know.
I—know.
Somewhere in the house a telephone rang. It rang only once.
A moment later the bedroom door opened a crack and then came open
wider.
“Oh—you’re awake,” a woman’s voice said.
“Semi-awake,” Cathy said. “I feel like I’ve got a hangover.”
“There was a call from your parents. They’re getting an afternoon flight
and will be in late this evening.” The owner of the voice came into the
room and stood next to the bed. “What can I get you, hon? Coffee?”
“I don’t know. Yes, coffee, I guess. You haven’t been here all night,
have you, Rose?”
“Of course I have. What are neighbors for if not to be on hand when—
things happen?” The woman said, “It’s a good thing you turned off your
cell, or you’d have been up at dawn. There have been a lot of calls on the
house phone. Brian’s principal called, and several of the teachers, and some
professor at the college who said he was head of the English Department
there. I’ve kept a list of the names.”
“That’s good of you, Rose.” Cathy pulled herself, with effort, to a
sitting position. “Well, Brian Junior’s still with us. He just kicked me a
good one. How do they all know about it? Is it in the paper?”
“There’s a big write-up on the front page,” Rose said. “They even have
Brian’s picture, though it doesn’t look much like him without the mustache.
I don’t know where they got that.”
“It was probably taken back when he was at the university. They must
have gotten it out of a yearbook file or something.” Her tongue felt thick
and her head ached when she fell back onto the pillow. “Can I see it?”
“You don’t want to read it all, hon. It’ll only upset you.”
“What is, is,” Cathy said. “Reading about it isn’t going to make it any
worse. Maybe when I read it, it will go into some sort of perspective.
Maybe it will start to make sense. Who could possibly hate Brian enough to
do this thing? What kind of person hates like that?”
“They’ll find him. That’s what police are for.”
“But they don’t know where to start. All they could talk about was the
Windbreaker. There has to be something more than that, some better
starting place. When I was with them yesterday I must have been in shock.
I couldn’t think. Everything they said to me seemed to run in and out of my
brain like water. I kept trying to grab hold of things, but they kept sliding
away from me before I could put them together to make any sort of
meaning.”
“That was a blessing, maybe.”
“There was something—the name of somebody—that meant something
to me. I remember having a feeling of recognition when I heard it. I started
to tell them, and then Icouldn’t remember any longer what it was I was
going tosay.”
The telephone rang again, clearer, now that the bedroom door was
open.
“I’ll get that,” Rose said, “and then I’ll bring you coffee.”
“And the paper,” Cathy said.
***
At eleven ten on Sunday morning, Mrs. Irma Ruggles sat in a chair by her
bedroom window and played with the circle of gold on the fourth finger of
her right hand. First she turned it so she could see the tree and read the
German words; then she released it and let its own weight twist the ring so
that all she could see was the band.
The ring was loose on her finger, but not too terribly loose. If it had
been even a fraction of an inch smaller it might have been difficult sliding
it over her knuckle.
Whomever this belongs to has a thin hand for a man, thought Mrs.
Ruggles, turning the ring again so that the tree appeared ontop.
She could not have said exactly when it was that she had stopped
thinking of the ring as belonging to her son and had inserted a nameless
owner in his place. Yesterday morning, when she had found it in David’s
dresser, she had been so certain that he had gotten it from his father. The
shock of seeing it there, among the dimes and nickels in the box she always
visited for candy money, had jolted her terribly. It had been like hearing her
son’s voice crying out to her across the years.
But later, when she had confronted David with her suspicions, things
had not occurred as she had expected. He had been rattled, yes, and he had
certainly acted guilty, but not guilty as a boy might be who had a glorious
secret. “I haven’t seen my dad since I was a little kid,” he had told her, and
the words had rung true. David was not good at deception. Hecould not
have falsified the pain in his voice, any more than he could have injected
convincing sincerity into his next statement: “I found it.”
And the girl—the plain, mousy, bespectacled girl, who was so exactly
the opposite of any girl she would ever have picked for David—that girl
had lied so badly that anyone with half a brain could have realized she was
not telling the truth. And then, the look on her face when she had been told,
“There was no stone in the ring. There was a tree.…” Her eyes had gotten a
wild, glazed look, and then she had closed them and stood there, silent, as
though wishing herself a million miles away.
Irma had not accepted it then, perhaps because she did not want to
accept it. But little by little in the long hours since, the dream had fallen
away. Her son was not in town. He would not turn up suddenly on the
doorstep, his beautiful face alight with joy and love. Her David, the first
David, had vanished from their lives with the finality of a bright bird flying
straight into the sun, leaving nothing behind him but the memory of a
feathered touch and the rustle of restless wings. She would not see him
again in this world and perhaps, if the things the Reverend Chandler
preached were true, not anywhere.
“Those who refuse to shoulder their earthly burdens will never know
the glory of everlasting life,” the reverend had said straight from the pulpit
seven years ago, and Irma had refused to attend church since.
This had upset her daughter-in-law terribly.
“He didn’t mean anything personal, Mother Ruggles,” she had said.
“My goodness, with the hundreds of people he has in his congregation, he
can’t stop and worry about the effect every single thing he says will have
on every one of them. How’s it going to look, if you stop attending services
with David and me? People will think I won’t take the trouble to bring
you.”
“They won’t think that,” Irma had told her. “They know how
responsible you are. Just tell them I’m feeling poorly.”
“Every Sunday?”
“I’m an old woman. When you get old, you can feel poorly whenever
you want to.” She had meant this as a little joke, but her daughter-in-law
had not found it amusing. The fact was, she seldom found anything
amusing. Irma was sure that was one main reason why Big David had left
her. The winds of freedom are filled with laughter.
But now she was wandering. She knew she did that lately;
concentration became more difficult when you grew old. The thing she
wanted to think about now was the ring. If David had not found it and had
not gotten it from his father, then where had it come from? He was not
going to tell her, that wasevident, and his refusal was a challenge to her
innate stubbornness.
This morning he had come to her again, scrubbed and shining, dressed
in his church clothes, as handsome as his father had ever been as a boy, and
had said, “Gram, please let me have it.”
“Have what?” she had asked with feigned puzzlement, knowing that his
mother was right in the next room and wondering if he would mention it in
her hearing.
He wouldn’t.
“You know,” he had said in a low voice. “Gram, look, it’s really
important to me. You don’t know how important. It belongs to somebody,
and I have to give it back to him.”
“To who?”
“You don’t know him, Gram. His name wouldn’t mean anything to you.
Where are you keeping it? If you’ll get it for me, I’ll—”
“David, aren’t you ready yet?” his mother had called from the living
room. “We’re going to be late and have to sit in the back.”
And so he had gone, glancing back at her with a pleading, worried look
as he left, and she had experienced a subtle shift in her own emotions.
David was honestly upset, as upset as she had ever seen him. And the girl
had been also. There was something very wrong here, somehow.
Where had this ring come from, and why was it so important?
She was back to the beginning again. She turned the ring slowly on her
finger, staring at it as though the answer might suddenly appear
interspersed with the words of German. Could David have stolen the ring?
Such a thing was hard to imagine, but young people today did seem to be
under all kindsof intense pressures that drove them to do strange and
unpredictable things. Davy didn’t have much spending money, and now
that he was beginning to date, this might be suddenly important. At the
same time, common sense told you that if you were going to steal for
money, there were all sorts of things more marketable than a college ring.
Lost in contemplation, Irma Ruggles did not hear the front door open,
only the sharp click as it was shoved closed. Could time have passed so
quickly? She glanced up, startled.
“Davy,” she called, “is that you?”
There was no answer.
“Davy?” she said again, turning to face the figure that had appeared
silently in the bedroom doorway, and then she stopped, bewildered. Her
hands rose with a jerk that sent the ring sliding off her finger, into her lap.
“Why, you’re not Davy!” she said to the boy with the funny eyes.
CHAPTER 17
MISS MCCONNELL:
IT PLEASES ME TO SEE THE GROWING MATURITY OF YOUR WORK. IT IS INDEED THE
“LITTLE DEATHS,” THE SMALL, DAILY REJECTIONS OF OUR WELL-MEANT
OFFERINGS, THAT RENDER THE SOUL LIFELESS. IT IS AN ADULT THOUGHT, WELL
EXPRESSED.
I AM GLAD THAT YOU ARE A JUNIOR, FOR IT WILL ALLOW ME ONE MORE YEAR IN
WHICH TO WORK WITH YOU . I LOOK FORWARD TO WATCHING YOUR CONTINUED
DEVELOPMENT AS A WRITER AND HOPE THAT I MAY BE ABLE TO CONTRIBUTE
TOWARD IT.
BRIAN GRIFFIN
If she had been the Susan of two weeks before, she would have wept, but
this new Susan had cried herself dry of tears.
She replaced the paper in the drawer and went to comb her hair.
Q&A WITH THE AUTHOR
Young adult author Barry Lyga sat down with
Lois Duncan to ask her all about
Barry: I know that when you were updating KILLING MR. GRIFFIN you
considered changing psychopath to sociopath, but chose not to. Why not?
Lois: The terms sociopath and psychopath are often used interchangeably.
We’re talking about a personality disorder that people are born with.
Neither psychopaths nor sociopaths are capable of feeling remorse or guilt.
They appear to lack a conscience and have no regard for the rights or
feelings of others. Those traits often surface by the age of fifteen.
One of the first signs is often cruelty to animals, and I used that in the
chapter which has a reference to Mark setting fire to a cat. So we’ve got
two terms for almost identical conditions, and the line between them is so
vague, even psychiatrists find themselves arguing over which is which.
When I wrote KILLING MR. GRIFFIN, I knew the term psychopath, and
so I used it. Since then, I’ve had a chance to meet several people who
actually have been diagnosed as sociopaths and so I felt a little more
comfortable with that word because I was more familiar with it. I thought,
Oh, well I’ll change it. However, I realized that in the book I had given a
clinical description of a psychopath extracted from a textbook. So I thought
I better not get myself into trouble by suddenly changing the term to
sociopath. I don’t think we really know which Mark is, or whether it
matters. He has this disorder and that is that.
Barry: What inspired you to write about such a character, and how did you
go about researching it?
Lois: I’ve always been fascinated by why people do things and what makes
them what they are. There were people like Charles Manson and Ted
Bundy—people who had absolutely no sense of guilt about what they did,
performing horrible acts—and yet they were just as charming as they could
be. They fit right in with society. My good friend, true crime author Ann
Rule, had a desk right next to Ted Bundy’s and thought he was delightful.
He’d even walk her out to her car after work to make sure she wasn’t
mugged. When she discovered he was a serial killer, she was stunned. It’s a
strange, fascinating and horrifying condition.
When we read about these people as adults doing atrocious things, we
tend to forget that they weren’t always adults. They started out as children,
and they grew up and they went to school with other children. So we can
look around us today and figure that we’ve got them probably in every
school in the nation growing up right around the normal kids. They’re
developing in that situation and they’re practicing the skills that they will
later use as monstrous adults. So I thought, why don’t we see what one of
them might be like as a teenager?
Lois: No, I didn’t, because there was nothing inside Mark. That is one of
the strange things about this condition. It’s not that the person himself is
evil; it’s that he feels nothing. So he could do something evil, he could do
something good; he would feel the same about both of them. This was one
reason why, if you’ll notice, this book was written in third person, and I
changed viewpoints in different chapters. So in every chapter we have a
vision of Mark from a certain angle, but he appears quite different
depending on who is looking at him and how that particular person feels
about him.
I never wrote a single chapter from Mark’s viewpoint because I
wouldn’t know how to get inside his head. I would have no idea of the way
a psychopath might think, and I thought it would be interesting to have him
as a chameleon. You see him changing depending on who is viewing him.
Barry: Well, now that you’ve said you couldn’t get into his head, I’m
going to ask you to get into his head for a moment. Do you think he
intended for Mr. Griffin to die?
Lois: No, I don’t think he did. I don’t think he cared if Mr. Griffin died or
not. I think he wanted the thrill of the kidnap, and he liked the power he
had over his followers, the way he could make his little band of robotic
admirers do what he wanted them to do. He wanted a new adventure, and I
don’t think he cared in the least what happened to Mr. Griffin. If his
purpose was for him to be dead, he would have gotten a gun and shot him.
He just didn’t care, and in a way that is even worse than if it had been a
hate-inspired murder.
Barry: Readers often assume that whatever you write about actually
happened to you, so did you have an English teacher that you didn’t like?
Did you have somebody that you wanted to kidnap and leave up in the
mountains?
Lois: No. I was very lucky. I had likable teachers. But Mr. Griffin wasn’t a
totally fictional character. He was based upon the personality of a teacher
that one of my daughters had in high school. That teacher was actually a
woman, and she was a drama teacher, and she was very strict and
demanded that her students do the best work they were capable of doing.
She wouldn’t let them get away with anything, and they all resented her.
Later it turned out that she had had more positive influence upon those kids
than any other teacher they ever had. My daughter, after she had graduated
and would come back home to visit, would go find this teacher and have
lunch with her. She was grateful to her, but back in high school she was
not. I used that type of teacher as the basis for Griffin, but, of course, I
changed her to a man and changed the field of study.
Barry: I know a lot of readers also ask you if Mr. Griffin was David’s
father.
Lois: No, Mr. Griffin wasn’t David’s father. There are lots of clues to
indicate that he isn’t. The personalities of the two men are totally different
—strict, over-conscientious Mr. Griffin and free-spirited, irresponsible Mr.
Ruggles. And if Mr. Ruggles were still living right there in the same town,
how could he do so without running into his wife or some of their joint
friends at some point? Especially if he’s teaching at a public high school
that all their children are attending?
In several places it’s mentioned that both men attended Stanford
University.So, of course, they wore identical class rings. The sight of that
ring on his father’s hand is a memory stored in David’s subconscious,
which is why he reacts so strongly when he sees the same ring on Mr.
Griffin’s hand.
Barry: In the book, one thing that we see repeated over and over is the
characters being persuaded to do things by Mark because of some attraction
or effect he has on them. Is that something you’ve seen particularly in
teens? That they’re malleable based on somebody that they’re attracted to?
Lois: Absolutely. I think that is probably the cause of most of the trouble
that young people get into. Peer pressure. They are easily swayed, and that
partially has to do with the development of the brain. Certain parts of the
brain develop at different ages, and the part that has to do with reasoning is
one of the later parts to develop. That’s one reason that insurance rates
come down when a driver reaches age twenty-five. That person is now
considered more responsible for his own actions. So I think that peer
pressure is a very, very strong element, not just today, but also back when
this book was firstwritten. Very little has changed in regard to that over the
years.
Barry: What about the characters of Susan and Betsy? These are the two
primary female characters and they’re very different.
Barry: That’s fascinating. I didn’t know that you did all of that background
work. That’s terrific.
Lois: Yes, I want to know why they do what they do, not just have them
jump out and do it. Motivation is something I think you can get across
much better in a novel than in a film.
Barry: Let’s talk a little bit about the “Song for Ophelia” in KILLING MR.
GRIFFIN. Was that a deliberate symbolic choice on your part or was it just
a case of “They’ve got to be studying something, so it might as well be
Hamlet?”
Barry: There are two moments in particular in the book that resonated for
me in a modern context really well. There’s a great indictment of parents in
the book when Jeff’s dad says, “All you have to do is open the paper or
pick up a magazine and you see a bunch of messed up kids in trouble. It
makes you wonder where the parents are while all that’s going on.” And
it’s just terrific because, as he’s saying this, his own kid is involved in a
kidnapping and murder!
Lois: Well I think that a typical reaction of many parents is, “Everybody
else’s kids are in trouble, but ours are so perfect. All those other parents are
just hiding their eyes from what’s going on in their own kid’s life. Can you
imagine such an irresponsible parent?” Here, the parent who’s condemning
the others is doing just the same thing. I thought it was quite ironic. I rather
enjoyed writing that scene.
Barry: I loved that moment. I actually laughed out loud and had to put the
book down for a moment when I got to that. The other thing that really
resonates for me right now is just the general tenor of Mr. Griffin’s
complaints and issues with unprepared college students and their attitudes.
That could’ve been transplanted directly into a modern context and now it
has been, and I was wondering what your own education was like?
Lois: Well, I went through high school and I did well. I wasn’t good at
things like math, and chemistry was just horrible, but I was very good at
anything related to English. I studied hard and I took my school life
seriously, and I did very well in high school. I was offered an English
scholarship to Duke University. My parents wouldn’t allow me to take it
because they didn’t think it was fair.
Lois: Because they had saved up and had enough for my college education,
and there were plenty of kids who didn’t have that money, and they didn’t
think it was fair that I should accept the scholarship when it ought to go to
someone who needed it more. That should tell you something about my
parents.
Lois: I went to college for one year and fell in love and got married and
dropped out. I didn’t get the rest of my formal education until I was in my
forties. At that point I was teaching for the journalism department at the
University of New Mexico and they had forgotten to check my credentials.
I was hired to replace the magazine writing teacher in an emergency
situation, because she became very ill and couldn’t teach her class. Tony
Hillerman, the writer, was a personal friend of mine, and he was the
chairman of the journalism department at the time. He asked me if I would
step in and take her place, and so I did without anyone doing a background
check.
I really loved teaching and the original teacher never came back, and so
I stayed on. Tony stopped chairing the department to become a famous
novelist, and I kept on teaching year after year, and I thought, Somebody
will eventually find out. So I started sneakily taking classes on either side of
the one I was teaching. I was teaching under my professional name, Lois
Duncan. I was married to Don Arquette, so my married name was Arquette,
and Lois Arquette started taking classes. I would see my own students in
some of them. They thought this was howlingly funny. In one class I would
be Professor Duncan and in the other class it would be, “Hey, Lois, can you
loan me your notes?”
In my juvenile literature class, we were studying Lois Duncan books,
and I wrote some very insightful papers for the teacher who didn’t know
my double identity. And then I wanted to accelerate the process, so “Lois
Arquette” took Lois Duncan’s writing class and aced it!
I eventually graduated with honors and a degree in English. When I
start out to do something, I really work at it. I had five children at home,
too, at that point, so I was teaching and writing and going to college and
raising my family all at the same time. And enjoying every minute of it.
Lois: I see Betsy as absolutely shallow, with no real value system. She’s
used to getting her way, and she doesn’t want to be told not to do things. So
here’s this police officer trying to tell her not to do something, just like Mr.
Griffin did. Nobody gets to pull rank like that on cute little Betsy. She
wants to get up to the mountains to be with the others and this darned
police officer is in her way, and she’s not going to stand for that. So she
tries to pull rank on him.
Barry: I just love how that moment ties in later to the scene in the airport
parking lot when they pull in and it’s the same police officer, and he says,
“Afternoon, Miss Cline.”
Lois: I loved that, too. Now, that’s one of those things that just happen
when you’re writing a novel. I didn’t plan that scene. I didn’t know it was
going to be there until I got her into the parking lot, and then suddenly I
thought, Oh, I’ve got a great idea! And I reached back and grabbed my
police officer, a character I never expected to use again, and brought him
forward and stuck him into a new slot. Once in a while, as you know from
your own writing, you’re taken by surprise by the process itself. Something
is meant to be, and suddenly, there it is! It’s almost like being given a
present.
Barry: And it wasn’t just something that just got dropped in. I mean, it
spun out and had an impact on the rest of the story, so it changed what you
were writing, and to me, it’s just terrific when something like that happens.
Lois: Yes, I generally get the basic plot nailed down. It’s like you’re taking
a trip, and you know your destination, and you have a map to get you there.
You know ahead of time that you’re going to be spending the night in this
town, then in this town, and then in this third town, and then you’re going
to end up where you want to be. So I have that sort of loosely constructed
outline in my mind, but there’s still room for side trips, and sometimes
those side trips will get you into terrain you didn’t expect.
Barry: That’s great. One place we knew you had to hit, of course, is the
ending, which in some ways almost seems to absolve Susan of guilt. Do
you think she bears any guilt for what happened to Mr. Griffin?
Lois: I think that she’s been punished in a way that is the ultimate kind of
punishment for someone like Susan. She has lost her innocence and has lost
the person in her life who would have become her mentor and might have
been the person who would challenge and inspire her to become a
successful professional writer. She has created her own punishment that
way. She is guilty, because she let something happen that she should have
stopped, and she didn’t have the guts to speak out and prevent it from
occurring. But she’s not, in my mind, as guilty as the others.
Barry Lyga is the author of several novels for teens, including the acclaimed The Astonishing
Adventures of Fanboy & Goth Girl, its sequel, Goth Girl Rising, and the award-winning Boy Toy. He
is also the author of the upcoming thriller series I Hunt Killers, about the son of a notorious serial
killer who must use the skills taught to him by his father to track down a murderer.
READER DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
By Lois Duncan
Prepared by Jeremy Cesarec
Lois Duncan is the author of over fifty books, from children’s picture books
to poetry to adult non-fiction, but is best known for her young adult
suspense novels, which have received awards in sixteen states and three
foreign countries. In 1992, Lois was presented the Margaret A. Edwards
Award by the School Library Journal and the ALA Young Adult Library
Services Association for “a distinguished body of adolescent literature.” In
2009, she received the St. Katharine Drexel Award, given by the Catholic
Library Association “to recognize an outstanding contribution by an
individual to the growth of high school and young adult librarianship and
literature.”
Lois was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Sarasota,
Florida. She submitted her first story to a magazine at age ten and became
published at thirteen. She wrote throughout her high school years,
particularly for Seventeen.
As an adult, Lois moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she
taught magazine writing for the Journalism Department at the University of
New Mexico. Over three hundred of her articles and stories appeared in
such publications as Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, and Reader’s Digest.
Some readers know her as the author of WHO KILLED MY
DAUGHTER?, the heartbreaking true story of the murder of Kaitlyn
Arquette, the youngest of Lois’ children. A full account of the family’s
ongoing investigation of this still-unsolved homicide can be found at
http://kaitarquette.arquettes.com.
Lois and her husband, Don Arquette, currently live in Sarasota, Florida.
They are the parents of five children.
You can visit Lois at http://loisduncan.arquettes.com.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Q&A with the Author
Reader Discussion Question
Lois Duncan
Copyright
Copyright
Reader Discussion Questions and Author Q&A copyright © 2010 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in
a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First eBook Edition: September 2010
First published in hardcover in April 1978 by Little, Brown and Company
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living
or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-316-18264-5